Kinetoplastid Biology and Disease

Background: The direct agglutination test (DAT) has proved to be a very important serodiagnostic tool combining high levels of intrinsic validity and ease of performance. Otherwise, fast agglutination screening test (FAST) utilises only one serum dilution making the test very suitable for the screening of large populations. Results: We have tested FAST and DAT for the detection anti-Leishmania antibodies in serum samples from patients with American visceral (AVL) and cutaneous leishmaniases (ACL) in Minas Gerais State, Brazil. The DAT on serum and blood samples of confirmed AVL patients found all samples positive at a serum dilution of ≥ 1:800. This dilution was subsequently used as cut off value in the study. The blood and serum samples of these confirmed patients could also be clearly read in FAST using a 1:100 dilution with the same high sensitivity. DAT and FAST were not able to detect significant amounts of antibodies in samples from ACL patients and are not suitable for the diagnosis of this manifestation of the disease. Conclusion: We suggest that both DAT and FAST are very practical diagnostic tools for the serodiagnosis of AVL under rural conditions as both serological tests do not require sophisticated equipment, a cold chain and are very simple to perform. Background American visceral leishmaniasis (AVL) a protozoan disease caused by Leishmania chagasi parasites, constitutes a major health problem in Brazil. In the last few years the number of human cases of AVL in the metropolitan region of Belo Horizonte (MRBH), state of Minas Gerais, Brazil has increased, indicating an elevation in the transmission rate of the disease [1]. Dogs and fox are considered to be the main reservoirs host for this parasite [2,3]. The diagnosis of AVL is based on clinical-epidemiological characteristics, by microscopical demonstration of the parasite in biopsies of aspirates, indirectly by serological tests and culturing or molecular methods like the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) [4-6]. Several Published: 14 June 2005 Kinetoplastid Biology and Disease 2005, 4:4 doi:10.1186/1475-9292-4-4 Received: 23 December 2004 Accepted: 14 June 2005 This article is available from: http://www.kinetoplastids.com/content/4/1/4 © 2005 Silva et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.