Laboratory evaluation of five rapid diagnostic tests for the serological diagnosis of chronic Trypanosoma cruzi infection in Yucatan, Mexico

Trypanosoma cruzi chronic infection in Yucatan, Mexico: BiolineTM Chagas Ab detected 35/36 positives with 97.2% sensitivity and near-perfect agreement (kappa=0.90) versus the NOM reference algorithm.

• Why it matters: Chagas disease remains largely undiagnosed in Latin America, and Mexican cohorts lack systematic performance evaluations of rapid serological tests for screening strategies.
• What they did: Five RDTs were assessed using 79 archived human serum samples from Yucatan, benchmarked against a Mexican Official Norm (NOM) reference algorithm requiring reactivity to ≥2 conventional assays.
• The result: BiolineTM Chagas Ab (97.2%) and Chagas Sero K-SeT (91.7%, 33/36) showed high sensitivity and concordance, while Certum (0.0%), Mexlab (5.6%), and Amunet (33.3%) had low sensitivity; specificity was consistently high (93.0–100%).