In 1998, Taiwan was hit hard by a wave of enterovirus outbreaks, forcing health authorities to set up a multivariate system of enterovirus notification and surveillance to better understand the prevalent trend of the disease.Statistics shows that during the period of 1998~2007, the major circulating enterovirus strains in the Taiwan region were members of the Coxsackie virus A (CVA) group, and the most commonly seen serotypes of such group included CVA 2, CVA 4, CVA 5, CVA 6, CVA 10, and CVA 16.In addition, it is also found that these CVA serotypes occurred in the Taiwan region periodically.However, only 3 serotype-specific immuno-fluorescence staining assay (IFA) typing kits were available in the market for identifying CVA 9, CVA 16, and CVA24.In other words, 5 out of the 6 most commonly seen serotypes in Taiwan, CVA 2, CVA 4, CVA 5, CVA 6, and CVA 10 cannot be identified using the aforementioned IFA typing kits.Therefore, a more conventional and much more time-consuming genetic sequencing method or neutralization test was often employed to verify CVA 2, CVA 4, CVA 5, CVA 6, and CVA 10, which conceivably resulted in undesirable delays in diagnosis.In view of the above, Taiwan CDC Virology Laboratory decided to develop a Coxsackievirus A IFA typing kit set that is capable of detecting CVA 2, CVA 4, CVA 5, CVA 6, and CVA 10.In late 2007, the developing phase of the project was completed.Now, this kit set has been mass-produced and distributed to the 13 contract laboratories (most of them are affiliated with medical centers) of Taiwan CDC across the nation.The kit set can swiftly and correctly determine the enterovirus subtypes of interest, thus saving significant diagnostic time.
To sum up, the newly developed Coxsackievirus A IFA typing kit set has the following advantages.
1. The kit set has an excellent sensitivity range (95.9~100%) and a very high specificity range (95.8~97.2%), which will definitely help increase the virus detection accuracy.
2. The kit set can enhance the typing rate of the enteroviruses, thus allowing better understanding of the prevalence of individual viruses in Taiwan, and speed up case treatment and endemic control due to the shorter amount of time the kit set takes to detect the virus.
3. Although the kit set is not available for sale at the moment, the number of kit sets that have been produced is estimated to worth tens of millions NT dollars.
4. The details concerning the development of the kit set have been written into a paper and published in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology as a proof of achievement of Taiwan CDC.