Mass scale screening of common arboviral infections by an affordable, cost effective RT–PCR method

Abstract

Objective To develop a rapid, cost effective RT-PCR method for the mass scale diagnosis of such diseases at the viremia stage to find out the actual disease burden in that area. Methods For this purpose, cases with the history of only short febrile illness were considered. Thus 157 samples with the history of dengue/chikungunya like illness and only 58 samples with a history of acute encephalitis syndrome (AES)were selected. Results Out of 157 samples, 42 and 74 were detected as dengue and chikungunya, respectively and out of 58 AES cases only 23 could be detected as Japanese encephalitis by this RT-PCR method. Conclusions This cost effective RT-PCR method can detect the total positive cases that remain undetected by ELISA method. Moreover, this method is capable to detect the viral RNA from patients' sera even after the appearance of IgM antibody at one fifth costs as compared with the other commercially available kits.