Lateral flow assays for the detection of African swine fever virus
antigen are not fit for field diagnosis of wild boar carcasses
Abstract
African swine fever (ASF) is one of the most important viral diseases of
domestic pigs and wild boar. Apart from endemic cycles in Africa, ASF is
now continuously spreading in Europe and Asia. As ASF leads to severe
but unspecific clinical signs and high lethality, early pathogen
detection is of utmost importance. Recently, “point-of-care” (POC)
tests have been intensively discussed for the use in remote areas but
also in the context of on-farm epidemiological investigations and wild
boar carcass screening. Along these lines, the INGEZIM ASFV CROM Ag
lateral flow assay (Eurofins Technologies Ingenasa) promises virus
antigen detection under field conditions within minutes. In the present
study, we evaluated the performance of the assay with selected
high-quality reference blood samples, and also with real field samples
from wild boar carcasses in different stages of decay from the ongoing
ASF outbreak in Germany. While we observed a sensitivity of roughly 77%
in freeze-thawed matrices of close to ideal quality, our approach to
simulate field conditions in direct carcass testing without any
modification resulted in a drastically reduced sensitivity of only
12.5%. Freeze thawing increased the sensitivity to roughly 44% which
mirrored the overall sensitivity of 49% in the total data set of
carcass samples. A diagnostic specificity of 100% was observed.
However, most of the German ASF cases in wild boar would have been
missed using the lateral flow assay (LFA) alone. Therefore, the
antigen-specific LFA should not be regarded as a substitute for any OIE
listed diagnostic method and has very limited use for carcass testing at
the point of care. For optimized LFA antigen tests, the sensitivity with
field samples must be significantly increased. An improved sensitivity
is seen with freeze-thawed samples, which may indicate problems in the
accessibility of ASFV antigen.