Background
Human brucellosis is an important zoonotic disease of public health and often remains neglected owing to lack of sensitive and efficient diagnostic
Discussion
The B. abortus S19-derived whole-cell protein-based ELISA is rapid and cost-effective and can be used for screening brucellosis infection in lieu of the commercially available ELISA kits.
Methods
A prospective cohort study involving different populations within the Vidarbha regions of Maharashtra, India was conducted through camps organised from May 2009 to October 2015. A total of 568 serum samples were collected from high-risk people recruited as study cohorts based on inclusion criteria, additional risk factors and clinical symptoms. Samples were evaluated by indirect ELISA using the whole-cell antigens of B. abortus. The
Results
Fever, body ache, joint pain, lower back pain, loss of appetite and weight loss were major symptoms associated with the disease. With the cut-off of > 0.8, the positivity of brucellosis infection was at 12.32% (70/568) compared to 9.33% (53/568) as detected by the commercial kit. The in-house developed ELISA method yielded a sensitivity of 87.5% and specificity of 99.18% as compared to the commercial kits (sensitivity -80.30% and specificity -99.6%).