Rapid assay for detection of toxic shock syndrome toxin 1 from human sera.

A noncompetitive enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay that enables the quantitation of toxic shock syndrome toxin 1 (TSST-1) to as little as 30 pg/ml and the detection of TSST-1 to 10 pg/ml in phosphate-buffered saline including 33% human serum or plasma was developed. It takes only 3 h to complete this assay after plate preparation. In this study, 64 human serum samples obtained from 30 patients with toxic shock syndrome or toxic shock syndrome-like symptoms were subjected to testing for the detection of TSST-1. With a cutoff level for TSST-1 of less than 100 pg/ml, 28 samples obtained from 12 patients were positive for TSST-1. The mean and maximum concentrations for these TSST-1-positive samples were 440 and 5,450 pg/ml, respectively. Of these 12 patients, 8 were Staphylococcus aureus culture positive, 3 were negative upon bacterial culturing, and 1 had no cultures done.