Competitive ELISA: its validation and use in monitoring Contagious Bovine Pleuropneumonia (CBPP) antibody in Mbarara District.

Abstract

Diagnosis is of CBPP presents one of the major difficulties in the control of the disease. As a way of improving diagnosis, a competitive ELISA has been developed and a study was carried out to test, validate, and assess its field performance. A cross-sectional epidemiological sero-survey was carried out in Bukanga and Isingiro counties of Mbarara district, to determine the pre-study prevalence of CBPP in the two counties. Cluster sampling based on villages as well as multistage, purposive and simple random sampling were used in site selection. For analysis, blood samples were collected from 10% of all the presented herds. Epidemiological data were collected for herd and individual animals. All animals sampled were examined clinically for signs of CBPP. Our findings indicate that sero-prevalence by ELISA was always higher than that by CFT, which confirmed the epidemiological status of the study locations that were first obtained through focus group discussions. The graphical illustrations of the distribution of the negative and positive populations depict normal distribution hence a good laboratory performance of the test. Results from this study indicate that the relative specificity of c-ELISA is satisfactory when results are interpreted at the individual animal level.