Abstract
Feline foamy virus (FFV) is a contact-dependent retrovirus forming chronic, largely apathogenic, infections in domestic and wild felid populations worldwide. Given there is no current ‘gold standard’ diagnostic test for FFV, efforts to elucidate the ecology and epidemiology of the virus may be complicated by unknown sensitivity and specificity of diagnostic tests. Using Bayesian Latent Class Analysis, we estimated the sensitivity and specificity of the only two FFV diagnostic tests available—ELISA and qPCR—as well as the prevalence of FFV in a large cohort of pumas from Colorado. We evaluated the diagnostic agreement of ELISA and qPCR, and whether differences in their diagnostic accuracy impacted risk factor analyses for FFV infection. Our results suggest ELISA and qPCR did not have strong diagnostic agreement, despite FFV causing a persistent infection. While both tests had similar sensitivity, ELISA had higher specificity. ELISA, but not qPCR, identified age to be a significant risk factor, whereas neither qPCR nor ELISA identified sex to be a risk factor. This suggests FFV transmission in pumas may primarily be via non-antagonistic, social interactions between adult conspecifics. Our study highlights that combined use of qPCR and ELISA for FFV may enhance estimates of the true prevalence of FFV and epidemiological inferences.
Highlights
Feline foamy virus (FFV) is a contact-dependent retrovirus that results in persistent and apparently apathogenic infections in domestic and wild cats globally[1,2]
Sera were tested at a 1:50 dilution, with a positive result being defined as an absorbance of two times the average of the duplicate wells of the negative control plus three times the standard deviation. Both quantitative PCR (qPCR) and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) were run with known FFV positive and negative samples validated by multiple laboratory personal using standardized protocols to ensure the rigor of our results
Se is the ability to correctly identify FFV+ pumas and Sp is the ability to correctly identify FFV− pumas
Summary
Feline foamy virus (FFV) is a contact-dependent retrovirus that results in persistent and apparently apathogenic infections in domestic and wild cats globally[1,2]. Several unique challenges exist in the development of well-characterized diagnostic tests for infections of wildlife These challenges include: field conditions that result in collected samples being less than optimally stored or processed, the current ‘gold standard’ test cannot be performed antemortem, or no known true positive and true negative samples are available. These limitations can result in diagnostic uncertainty that yields biased estimates of true disease prevalence[19]. Risk factors for infection, puma sex and age, were analyzed and compared for qPCR or ELISA to determine if the epidemiological inferences differed between the two diagnostic tests
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