Abstract
Cystic echinococcosis is still a major concern in South America. While some regions show advances in the control of the disease, others have among the highest incidence in the world. To reverse this situation the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) has launched a regional project on cystic echinococcosis control and surveillance. An early concern of the program was the lack of a standardized diagnostic tool to monitor infection in dogs, a key target of control programs. Under this premise, we have developed a new copro-ELISA test after extensive screening of a large panel of monoclonal antibodies (MAbs) and polyclonal sera, which performs with high standards of sensitivity (92.6%) and specificity (86.4%) as established by necropsy diagnosis of dogs. The key component of the test, MAbEg9 has a convenient IgG isotype and reacts with a periodate-resistant epitope found in high molecular weight components of the worm. Time-course analysis of experimentally infected dogs showed that even animals with a very low number of parasites could be detected as early as day 20 post infection. The test was formulated in a ready-to-use kit format with proven stability of each component for a minimum of 3 months at room temperature. This characteristic facilitates its standardized use and shipping to other laboratories, which was demonstrated by the identical results obtained by two different laboratories in Peru and our own laboratory when a large number of field samples were analyzed independently in a blind fashion.
Highlights
Cystic echinococcosis, caused by infections with Echinococcus granulosus, is one of the main zoonoses related to dogs and is affecting most parts of the globe [1]
We have developed an immunoassay for E. granulosus copro-antigen detection under the premise that in addition to performing with high standards of proven sensitivity and specificity, it had to be robust, standardized and developed in a kit format to be available for its use in regional programs for the control of the disease
The number of worms recovered from each dog varied widely, from 74 to 8,500, and showed no correlation with the initial number of protoescoleces used for infection
Summary
Cystic echinococcosis, caused by infections with Echinococcus granulosus, is one of the main zoonoses related to dogs and is affecting most parts of the globe [1]. The rate of success has been highly variable, it has become evident that a tight control of dog infections is the key element to arrest the life cycle of the parasite. This has created a demand for reliable diagnostic tests for canine echinococcosis as a tool to obtain epidemiological baseline information and help in the surveillance of hydatid control [2,3,4,5]. Different laboratory tests for ante-mortem diagnosis of canine echinococcosis have been developed, including detection of antibodies in serum, Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) amplification of parasite DNA and immunological detection of antigens (coproantigens) in fecal samples. Introduced at the beginning of the 1990’s, the detection of parasite antigens in fecal samples by Author Summary
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