Vaccination of cattle against bovine schistosomosis: current status and future prospects: a review

The role of nuclear technologies in the diagnosis and control of livestock diseases--a review

Nuclear and nuclear-related technologies have played an important role in animal health, particularly in relation to disease diagnosis and characterization of pathogenic organisms. This review focuses primarily on how and where nuclear technologies, both non-isotopic and isotopic methods, have made their impact in the past and where it might be expected they could have an impact in the future. The review outlines the extensive use of radiation attenuation in attempts to create vaccines for a multiplicity of pathogenic organisms and how the technology is being re-examined in the light of recent advances in irradiation techniques and cryopreservation/lyophilization that might obviate some of the problems of maintenance of viable, attenuate vaccines and their transport and use in the field. This approach could be used for a number of parasitic diseases where vaccination has been problematic and where investigations into the development of molecular vaccines have still failed to deliver satisfactory candidates for generating protective immune responses. Irradiation of antigens or serum samples also has its uses in diagnosis, especially when the samples need to be transported across international boundaries, or when handling the pathogens in question when carrying out a test presents serious health hazards to laboratory personnel. The present-day extensive use of enzyme immunoassays and molecular methods (e.g., polymerase chain reaction) for diagnosis and characterization of animal pathogens has its origins in the use of isotope-labeled antigens and antibodies. These isotopic techniques that included the use of 75Se, 32P, 125I, and 35S isotopes enabled a level of sensitivity and specificity that was hitherto unrealized, and it is prescient to remind ourselves of just how successful these technologies were, in spite of their infrequent use nowadays. Finally, the review looks at the potential for stable isotope analysis for a variety of applications--in the tracking of animal migrations, where the migrant are potential carriers of transboundary animal diseases, and where it would be useful to determine the origins of the carrier, e.g., Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza and its dissemination by wild water fowl. Other applications could be in monitoring sequestered microbial culture (e.g., rinderpest virus) where in the case of accidental or deliberate release of infective culture it would be possible to identify the laboratory from which the isolate originated.

Study of the effect of gamma-irradiation on bovine serum samples on the ability of monoclonal antibodies to detect invariant antigens of Trypanosoma congolense, T. vivax and T. brucei in enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays

Samples of bovine serum from uninfected and African trypanosomes-infected animals were tested before and after gamma-irradiation, using three sandwich enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISA). Each test system utilized a different monoclonal antibody, reputedly allowing the specific detection of conserved-invariant cytoplasmic antigens of trypanonosomes, T. congolense, T. vivax, and T. brucei, respectively. Results have identified two groups of samples. The first contained samples where there were unequivocal ELISA results indicating positivity and negativity, for non-irradiated samples. In this group, irradiation had no effect on the diagnostic sensitivity of the assays. All samples shown to be positive before irradiation remained positive and those shown to be negative, remained negative. There was, however, a statistically significant reduction in signal in each of the ELISAs following irradiation. The second group contained samples identified before irradiation as flanking the diagnostic negative/positive threshold of OD > or =0.05. These showed a negative bias after irradiation of the order of OD -0.01, which was shown to be statistically significant by paired t-statistics. Without correction of the given diagnostic negative/positive threshold, bovine sera with OD values around the threshold were expected to deliver more false negative test results upon irradiation. This was confirmed when serological data were compared with parasitological findings; where three times more false negative test results were found from irradiated serum samples. Consequently, for this group of irradiated bovine samples tested by ELISA, the re-adjustment of the diagnostic negative/positive threshold of the ELISAs using defined irradiated serum samples is recommended; otherwise, the frequency of false negative results might be increased.