Poster (in English) presented at the MED-VET-NET Scientific Meeting

We needed to find a valid and cheap way to test materials from goats for tick-borne encephalitis (TBE). We had the idea that testing of free-grazing household animals, could be an excellent sentinel of TBE risk in defined geographical areas. It should be potentially easy to get materials from farmers and organize such routine surveillance. Our virologist prof. Włodzimierz Gut explained that routine ELISA test manufactured to test human materials have to be validated/adapted to test various animals. The ELISA test could be a cost effective alternative to species-independent tests used to date. The poster describes the validation study we did to identify a simple, cheap and efficient test. Unfortunately we did not publish these results. We used the test to screen more than 1100 goat sera in a survey of breeding farms. Hopefully, our efforts will be used in the future to improve monitoring of vector-borne diseases.