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The suitability of a commercial bovine viral diarrhoea virus (BVDV) antigen capture enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) for routine diagnostic testing of bovine serum samples was evaluated by comparing the ELISA results of 214 sera with those obtained after two passages in roller tube cultures of fetal bovine lung cells and immunofluorescent staining using fluorescein isothiocyanate-conjugated hyperimmune BVDV anti-serum. In addition, 208 of these samples were tested by virus isolation in a microtitre system followed by indirect immunoperoxidase staining using a pool of two non-competing pestivirus specific monoclonal antibodies. The sensitivity of the ELISA compared with virus isolation followed by immunofluorescent and immunoperoxidase staining was 47.8 and 45.8%, respectively. The corresponding figures of specificity and overall correlation were 95.3 and 95.1%, and 90.2 and 89.4%. Twenty-two of 24 pestivirus isolates from the positive blood samples were typed as BVDV-like by monoclonal antibodies, indicating that the poor sensitivity of the ELISA was not due to the presence of atypical pestiviruses in the test sample. These results suggest that this ELISA is not suitable for testing blood samples for BVDV in a diagnostic laboratory.