Studies on Diagnosis of Foot and Mouth Disease by ELISA and Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction in Bovines

Abstract

Rapid and accurate identification of infected animals, those with either clinical or subclinical disease as well as with persistent infection, is essential for maintaining an efficient control programme of Foot and mouth disease. During the study period (2009-10), surveillance of Foot and mouth disease was conducted in the villages/towns/dairy farms/gaushalas affected with Foot and mouth disease outbreaks in Uttar Pradesh. A total of 25 tongue epithelia were collected from suspected cases of FMD and subjected to indirect sandwich ELISA and Reverse Transcription-PCR assays for the diagnosis. Out of 25 vesicular epithelium samples, 17 were found positive for the presence of FMD virus by ELISA (the overall type ability = 68.00%). Out of 25 samples, amplicons could be amplified from 20 samples (12 serotype O and 8 serotype A) using RT-PCR. However, serotype ‘C’ and ‘Asia-1’ could not be recovered from these samples. In the scenario of overall distribution pattern of FMD virus types, serotype ‘O’ (60.00%) was the predominant type, followed by serotype ‘A’ (40.00%).The findings indicate PCR assay as a simple, rapid, sensitive, reliable, reproducible and an additional confirmatory method for the identification of FMDV that will aid in surveillance, prevention and control of this pathogen.