A novel solution for reliable diagnosis of human brucellosis
Brucellosis remains as an important re-emerging zoonotic disease with worldwide distribution and special endemicity in areas such as the Mediterranean region, Latin America, Asia and Africa. This is mainly owed to limited availability of animal vaccines, expensive animal therapy, lack of vaccines for human use and still general inexperience with this devastating disease.
Human brucellosis is characterized by a variety of clinical manifestations and few distinctive physical signs, which makes it prone to be misdiagnosed by clinicians, especially in chronic cases. This problem leads in many occasions to treatment delays and severe morbidity and mortality rates, impacting directly on the global public health and agricultural economies of affected countries.
The challenge of clinical diagnosis turns laboratory testing into something indispensable. However, the microbiological culture method and immunological assays currently available for diagnosing brucellosis seem to be not simple, rapid or accurate enough to be performed in the smaller laboratories. These methods are technically challenging, difficult to interpret and time consuming.
In this context, Brucellacapt® has been evaluated in terms of diagnostic accuracy against culture and standard serologic techniques such as SAT, 2-ME and Coombs on 211 patients with suspected brucellosis in India. This study has been conducted by the honourable Dr. B.G. Mantur, Professor and Head of the Department of Microbiology at the Belgaum Institute of Medical Sciences in India and a high-class specialist in the diagnosis of brucellosis with worldwide recognition.
The results of Dr. Mantur's study show Brucellacapt® as a superior technique against SAT in all stages of the disease and as a very similar method to Coombs test in terms of sensitivity and specificity. However, while Coombs test turns out to be labour intensive, subjective in interpretation and demanding on skills, Brucellacapt® is simple to perform, does not have the subjective reading errors and grants reproducible results. This study has also shown Brucellacapt® to have an outstanding performance with 97.29% sensitivity and 97.08% specificity.
Brucellacapt® has been able to diagnose more cases of brucellosis than the other techniques employed in the study (an additional 3.3% against Coombs and 26.1% against SAT) and has proved its capability of being applied when testing large number of samples. In view of the conclusion drew from the study, Mantur et al. recognizes the efficacy of our test and recommends its use, specially in endemic areas, for an accurate serological confirmation of human brucellosis as well as for the diagnosis of relapses.
Vircell is well-pleased to have received such scientific recognition that acknowledges the efforts we undertake to fully lead the field through innovation and further expand the access to the diagnosis of such important disease worldwide.
Click here to learn more about this publication. Further literature review on Brucellacapt® can be found on our Bibliographysection.