“…Reduced sensitivity or specificity of certain tests may be caused by immunological abnormalities or phenomena with a known, and by others with a largely unknown capacity to give false-positive or false-negative results in serological tests. A variety of such immunological abnormalities have been found in the course of many parasitic diseases, for example, modified humoral and cell-mediated host responses to other infectious agents [23,52], polyclonal B-cell activation with autoantibodies of different specificity [~, 10, 15, 21, 33, 35, 36, 41], antiglobulins [I8, 19,22,51], increased levels of immunoglobulins not directed at antigens of the causative organism [9,13,38,50], elevated cold agglutinin titres, or circulating immune complexes [8,12,34].…”