Introduction: Blood transfusions are one of the major life saving procedures carried out to replace the host blood with that of donor to maintain the circulatory volume of blood. As most of the pathogenic microbes gets transmitted through haematogenous route. In order to provide a safe blood service in India, most sensitive and specific laboratory tests are the need of the hour even though the majority of the donations are through voluntary donations. Aims and Objectives: To study the correlation of ELISA and nucleic acid test in transfusion transmittable viral diseases Material and Methods: A two year study was carried out in Blood Bank of a tertiary health care centre in south central part of India for a duration of two years. All healthynon-remunerated voluntary blood donors were included in the study. Donors known positive for Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), Hepatitis B or Hepatitis C infection were excluded from the study. ELISA test was performed at the same institution and ID-NAT tests were done at Molecular laboratory of state reference lab. Results: A total of 16,286 voluntary blood donations were collected and tested for HIV, HBV, and HCV over a period of two years. Out of all healthy donors screened with standard operating protocol 13 cases were found to be positive for HIV, 136 cases for HBV and 16 cases for HCV in ELISA. NAT test done with the same donor’s sample is found to be positive in 20 cases for HIV, 158 cases for HBV and 18 cases for HCV. Conclusion: The screening method NAT for TTI is proved to be most effective method to detect TTI viruses than ELISA even in window period .

Keywords: Transfusion Transmittable Diseases; ELISA; NAT.