Development of enzyme linked immunosorbent assay for the detection of antibodies to duck plague virus

Duck plague also known as duck viral enteritis is an acute contagious disease of ducks, geese and related species caused by duck plague virus (DPV). The disease causes high mortalities in ducks affecting the economy of the duck farmers. In order to undertake effective control of the disease, it is necessary that diagnosis should be made early. As the available immuno-diagnostics methods viz. agargel precipitation test (Cottral, 1979), fluorescent antibody test (Burgess et al., 1979), reverse passive haemagglutination test (Deng et al., 1984) and counterimmuno-electrophoresis test (John et al., 1989) for detection of antibodies to DPV in the serum samples are time consuming, there,is a need for suitable and non-laboratory on-site test for detection antibodies to DPV in the serum samples of infected ducks. Since the introduction of ELISA for detection of antigen or antibodies to a varieties of human and animal viral antigens (Engvall, 1980; Avrames et al.,1983) it has been widely used to detect antibodies and antigens in a variety of test systems. A need was therefore felt to develop and standardize an indirect ELISA which is simple, specific and sensitive.