Evaluation of Equine Infectious Anemia Virus by the Indirect Enzyme-linked Immunosorbent Assay EIA-LAB as Screening Tools in Mexico

Abstract

Equine infectious anemia is a worldwide distributed disease that affects the Equide family. Commercial effective vaccine is not available, for that reason control of the disease depends on diagnostic tools. To improve the efficiency of the diagnostic program in Cuba, LABIOFAM Group, developed an indirect enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), ELISA kit, to complement the diagnostic system that currently uses the agar gel immunodiffusion (AGID) kit. The ELISA AIE-LAB Kit was evaluated in a Mexican context, compared with the gold standard test Agar gel immunodiffusion, AGID AIE-LABIOFAM, and commercial AGID kit. The analytical sensitivity was determined using serial dilutions twofold of the positive control serum to establish the range of detected antibodies in relation to the cutoff value of the plate (OD 0.300). A precision study was carried out to evaluate repeatability, intermediate precision, and reproducibility by estimating the standard deviation and coefficient of variation. The precision results were satisfactory and the values of the coefficient of variation were considered adequate to guarantee an excellent consistency of the ELISA AIE-LAB. The diagnostic performance of the ELISA AIE-LAB involved the evaluation of specificity, sensitivity, and concordance in comparison with both AGID tests. The diagnostic sensitivity was 100% and the specificity 97.6%, with a very good degree of concordance (Kappa ¼ 0.9). The results suggest that the ELISA AIE-LAB test could be used in Mexico as a diagnostic system for the detection of specific antibodies against the equine infectious anemia virus, as per current international norms.

The Use of Peptides in Veterinary Serodiagnosis of Infectious Diseases: A Review

“…Equine infectious anemia (EIA) is one of the most important diseases which lack a vaccine or an effective treatment, the diagnosis is based on agar gel immunodiffusion (AGID) as the approved test, however, it is prone to false negatives and subjective readings can lead to error; this situation has been explored with other alternatives, especially ELISA [ 57 ]. For example, an investigation with pELISA reported a sensitivity of 98.6% and specificity of 95.6% when compared to AGID test and was used successfully with different equid species: horses ( Equus caballus ), donkeys ( Equus asinus ), and mules ( Equus caballus × Equus asinus ) [ 58 ].…”

“…Likewise, a commercial pELISA designed against the same disease (AGID-AIE Kit, LABIOFAM, Cuba) was evaluated in Mexico and similar results were obtained with a sensitivity of 100% and a specificity of 97.6%. Therefore these results in different countries suggest that pELISA is an excellent alternative to detect EIA in equid populations [ 57 ].…”