Diagnosis of schistosomiasis is still widely reliant on traditional parasitological methods, i.e. the Kato-Katz faecal smear for Schistosoma mansoni and urine filtration for S. haematobium. Since these methods are insensitive, relatively laborious and expensive to perform, much effort has been expended into developing alternative ways of diagnosing the disease. Antibody-detection is the best method for diagnosis in areas of low endemicity. It has the merit of high sensitivity and is likely to be useful for schistosomiasis control as programmes are expanded and accelerated towards meeting the WHO's 2020 goals for neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). A rapid diagnostic test (RDT) for use at the point-of-care (POC) is much more likely to be useful in low-middle income countries than the current assays that are available for antibody-detection. Work has therefore begun towards developing such a test that incorporates S. mansoni cercarial transformation fluid (SmCTF) for the detection of anti -schistosome antibodies in human blood. Here it is demonstrated that SmCTF performs equivalently to S. mansoni soluble egg antigens (SmSEA) in an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELlSA) format for the detection of anti -So mansoni, anti-So haematobium and anti-So japonicum antibodies.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:659220 |
| Date | January 2014 |
| Creators | Dawson, Emily Mae |
| Publisher | University of Nottingham |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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