False-positive Neisseria gonorrhoeae results on the Abbott Alinity m STI assay caused by Neisseria meningitidis: two cases from Australia
Janelle Maskell, Michael O'Connor, Monica M. Lahra, David M. Whiley, Sebastiaan van Hal, Todd M. Pryce · 2026
Read False-positive Neisseria gonorrhoeae results on the Abbott Alinity m STI assay caused by Neisseria meningitidis: two cases from Australia by Janelle Maskell, Michael O'Connor, Monica M. Lahra, David M. Whiley, Sebastiaan van Hal, Todd M. Pryce (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/PMC13343834.txt.
Description
Janelle Maskell and co-authors report, in a 2026 letter, two Australian cases where a gonorrhea test fired falsely on a harmless throat bacterium. Both men were symptom-free screening patients in Tasmania whose throat swabs tested positive on the Abbott Alinity m assay, yet a second platform said negative.
Culture grew Neisseria meningitidis from both swabs, and retesting pure colonies reproduced the false positive on Alinity while other assays mostly stayed negative. Genome sequencing showed capsule-free meningitis strains, kin to the gonorrhea germ and sharing its targeted opa gene. The cases warn labs that single-gene tests can misread throat samples, where the harmless cousin commonly lives, and confirm with a second target.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Janelle Maskell, Michael O'Connor, Monica M. Lahra, David M. Whiley, Sebastiaan van Hal, Todd M. Pryce |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 3852 |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |