Abstract
The current Zika virus (ZIKV) epidemic in the Americas caused an increase in diagnostic requests in European countries. Here we demonstrate high specificity of the Euroimmun anti-ZIKV IgG and IgM ELISA tests using putative cross-reacting sera of European patients with antibodies against tick-borne encephalitis virus, dengue virus, yellow fever virus and hepatitis C virus. This test may aid in counselling European travellers returning from regions where ZIKV is endemic.
Highlights
Samples with a high potential of causing cross-reactions in serological flavivirus assays were chosen: acute TBEV infection, acute dengue virus infection, recently boostered tick-borne encephalitis (TBE) vaccination with high levels of TBEV IgG, recent yellow fever vaccination and viraemic hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection
TBEV, dengue and HCV sera contained laboratory-confirmed high levels of IgG antibodies against these viruses
Our results provide strong evidence that the Euroimmun Zika virus (ZIKV) IgG ELISA is a specific tool and can be safely used to rule out ZIKV infection even on the background of pre-existing antibodies to different flaviviruses and other acute infections
Summary
ELISA: enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay; IgG; immunoglobulin G; IgM: immunoglobulin M; TBEV: tick-borne encephalitis virus; ZIKV: Zika virus. A TBEV IgM and IgG detections were performed with Serion classic ELISA TBE IgM and IgG quant assay (Virion/Serion, Würzburg, Germany). All 10 sera from the Brazilian patients tested positive using the ZIKV IgM ELISA (Table 2). One sample from a German patient with a polyclonal IgM (reactivity in TBE virus IgM and EBV IgM assay) was positive in the ZIKV IgM ELISA. Two samples from patients with acute EBV infection showed borderline results in the ZIKV IgM ELISA. None of the samples from patients with acute TBE virus infection, dengue fever, or recent yellow fever vaccination showed reactivity above the threshold for positivity, demonstrating the high specificity of the Euroimmun ZIKV IgM ELISA (Figure)
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