Prevalence of antibodies to Encephalitozoon cuniculi in stray dogs as determined by an ELISA

Department of Pure and Applied Biology, Imperial College of Science and Technology, London.

An ELISA, using Encephalitozoon cuniculi spores as antigen, was used to determine the prevalence of specific anti-E cuniculi IgG in a group of stray dogs. In a preliminary survey 51 of 248 sera were classified as positive with titres of 1:400 to 1:3200. The 18 sera with titres of 1:400 were reclassified as negative when no IgG binding to the spores could be detected by comparison with a standard curve of anti-E cuniculi IgG. The remaining 33 sera (13.3 per cent) were classified as low, moderate or strong positives. Comparison of total IgG and specific IgG showed that specific IgG was greatly increased in the moderately and strongly positive sera. E cuniculi may be of importance as one cause of fading puppy syndrome when transmitted transplacentally, and as a complicating infection in human immunodeficiency diseases.