%0 Journal Article %A Chiarella, Flavia Cecilia %A Culebras, Esther %A Fuentes-Ferrer, Manuel Enrique %A Picazo, Juan José %T Evaluation of the Alere i Influenza A&B assay for rapid identification of influenza A and influenza B viruses %D 2016 %J Journal of Medical Microbiology, %V 65 %N 6 %P 456-461 %@ 1473-5644 %R https://doi.org/10.1099/jmm.0.000249 %K Diagnostic tests %K Influenza %K Alere-i %K BinaxNow %I Microbiology Society, %X The Alere i Influenza A&B assay is a novel isothermal nucleic acid amplification assay capable of detecting and differentiating influenza A and B viruses in approximately 15 min with minimal hands-on time. This study was conducted in order to assess the performance of the Alere i Influenza A&B assay compared to molecular techniques, considered to be gold standard methods, to evaluate the results. A total of 119 nasopharyngeal swabs collected from inpatients with influenza-like illness were included in the study using both archived and prospectively collected samples from adults and children. Prospectively collected samples were also compared to the Alere BinaxNOW® Influenza A & B Card. The overall sensitivity for detection of influenza A and B viruses compared to those of molecular techniques were 65.96 % and 53.33 % respectively, while the specificity was 98.51 % and 95.96 %. Compared to the Alere BinaxNOW® Influenza A & B Card, the Alere i assay is considerably more sensitive for detection of influenza A and B viruses, although both tests demonstrated excellent specificity for diagnosis of influenza viruses. %U https://www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/journal/jmm/10.1099/jmm.0.000249