Evaluation of Crude Culture Filtrate Antigen from Burkholderia pseudomallei for Rapid Diagnosis of Melioidosis

Melioidosis is an infection caused by Burkholderia pseudomallei. The disease is an important cause of morbidity and mortality in Thailand, other countries in Southeast Asia, and northern Australia. The current method for the diagnosis of melioidosis is based on bacteriological culture. However, the method is time-consuming. In this study, we evaluated the use of an indirect enzyme-linked-immunosorbent assay (ELISA) and latex agglutination (LA) using crude culture filtrate antigen for detecting specific Burkholderia pseudomallei antibodies in patientsu sera. A total of 187 sera were tested. These samples comprised of 82 acute phase sera from patients with melioidosis, 51 acute phase sera from those with other bacterial infections, and 54 from normal healthy individually living in an endemic area. By using bacterial culture as the gold standard, it was found that, the sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value and negative predictive value of the indirect ELISA were 82.93%, 88.57%, 85.00% and 86.92%, respectively. For the LA, these values were 82.93%, 70.48%, 68.69% and 84.09%, respectively. Thus, it can be concluded that the specific antibody detection by using the crude filtrate antigen is useful for the rapid diagnosis of melioidosis in an endemic area.