Editor,—The one minute unbuffered rapid urease test,1 previously described in your journal,2was adopted for use at the Royal Melbourne Hospital endoscopy day ward because of its affordability, ease of use, and rapidity. Over time, we had noticed a number of cases where the test had been negative at the one minute mark but later became positive. As we were unsure of whether these “late” positive results represented true or false positives, we decided to run a short study to assess the accuracy of the urease test compared with the “gold standard” of histology.

To this end we read and recorded the urease test at …