Author
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Waters, Wade |
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VORDERMEIER, MARTIN - Animal & Plant Health Agency Apha |
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Submitted to: Book Chapter
Publication Type: Book / Chapter Publication Acceptance Date: 6/14/2016 Publication Date: N/A Citation: N/A Interpretive Summary: Technical Abstract: Bovine tuberculosis (TB) is generally considered a slowly progressive disease of extended duration (lasting years) and most cattle do not exhibit readily apparent clinical signs of infection until late in the course of disease. Currently, agent-based strategies for the detection of tuberculous cattle, such as detection of bacilli within bodily excretions, are generally unreliable for use as antemortem tests, possibly due to the paucibacillary nature of the disease resulting in a transient and low level of bacterial shedding. Thus, traditional clinical and microbiological techniques are rarely used for the ante-mortem diagnosis of bovine TB. Fortunately, Mycobacterium bovis is highly immunogenic in cattle, eliciting robust cell-mediated immune responses early in the course of disease; thereby, providing a useful surrogate of infection for a disease in which ante-mortem detection of the organism is difficult. This review covers the field of immune diagnosis of bovine TB with an emphasis on immunopathogenesis, current ante-mortem testing schemes, antigen mining strategies, promising candidate biomarkers, and alternative approaches. |
