Current and Future Molecular Diagnostics of Tick-Borne Diseases in Cattle

Abstract

Ticks and tick-borne diseases such as babesiosis, anaplasmosis, ehrlichiosis, Lyme disease, Crimean Congo hemorrhagic fever, and Rocky Mountain spotted fever pose a significant threat to animal and human health. Tick-borne diseases cause billions of dollars of losses to livestock farmers annually. These losses are partially attributed to the lack of sensitive, robust, cost effective and efficient diagnostic approaches that could detect the infectious pathogen at the early stages of illness. The modern nucleic acid-based multiplex diagnostic approaches have been developed in human medicine but are still absent in veterinary medicine. These powerful assays can screen 384 patient samples at one time, simultaneously detect numerous infectious pathogens in each test sample and provide the diagnostic answer in a few hours. Development, commercialization, and wide use of such high throughput multiplex molecular assays in the cattle tick-borne disease surveillance will help in early detection and control of infectious pathogens in the animal reservoir before community spread and spillover to humans. Such approaches in veterinary medicine will save animal life, prevent billions of dollars of economic loss to cattle herders and reduce unwanted stress to both human and animal health care systems. This literature review provides recent updates on molecular diagnostics of tick-borne pathogens and discusses the importance of modern nucleic acid high throughput multiplex diagnostic approaches in the prevention of tick-borne infection to livestock.

Revisão sistemática sobre diagnóstico molecular da tristeza parasitária bovina no Brasil: ocorrência e oportunidades futuras

“…A. L. Souza et al, 2018;Giglioti et al, 2021 Animals exhibiting clinical symptoms were reported in 17 herds due to A. marginale (n = 218 animals), in two herds due to B. bovis and B. bigemina (n = 5 animals), and 15 symptomatic cattle within a single herd were diagnosed using primers for Babesia spp. Symptomatic treatment was discussed in five articles (Bahia et al, 2020;Silva et al, 2016;Garcia et al, 2022;Reckziegel et al, 2022;Alberton et al, 2015), and chemoprophylaxis to prevent babesiosis was reported only on one farm (F. A. L. Souza et al, 2018) in cattle at 70 days of age. Tick control was reported in three studies (Casa et al, 2020;Andreotti et al, 2018).…”

A global systematic review and meta‐analysis on the babesiosis in dogs with special reference to Babesia canis

“…Despite the appropriate sensitivity and ease of application provided by IFA, its specificity is reduced (Alvarez et al., 2019 ). The absence of standardized antigenic targets, potential cross‐reactivity and the difficulties in determination of positivity thresholds are the drawbacks (Garcia et al., 2022 ). For the accurate detection of B. canis , rBcMSA1 and rBcSA1 exhibit promising serodiagnostic antigens for indirect ELISA and rapid immunochromatographic tests (ICTs) (Zhou et al., 2016 ).…”

Tick-borne Pathogen Detection and Its Association with Alterations in Packed Cell Volume of Dairy Cattle in Thailand

“…On the other hand, the PCR test is said to be a thousand times more sensitive than microscopy; thus, it is currently the preferred pathogen identification tool for TBPs [ 43 ]. PCR tests and other nucleic acid-based tests in general can be adapted to a variety of conditions and highly specific targets, making them more reliable and accurate pathogen identification tools [ 46 ]. Laboratory reagents and equipment that are required to perform the tests can be costly for resource-constrained places, but the increasing accessibility to nucleic acid-based tests has contributed to lowering the cost of PCR tests.…”