TY - BOOK AU - Rana Sajjad Ahmed AU - Prof. Dr. Muhammad Naeem Khan ED - ED - Faculty of Veterinary Sciences TI - Detection Of Toxoplasma Gondii Infectionin Butchers And Buffaloes By Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) and Latex Agglutination Test U1 - 0861,T PY - 2005/// KW - Department of Pathology N1 - Toxoplasmosis, a common parasitic zoonotic infection is usually aymptomatic in immunocompetent persons although it may be present as lymphadenopathy, febrility, etc. but it is a life threatening opportunistic infection in congenitally infected patients and in immunocompromised individuals (those with AIDS, malignancy, organ transplantation, etc). Human beings become infected with T. gondii usually by ingesting oocysts in food and water contaminated with cat feces or by consuming tissue cysts in undercooked meat. The diagnosis of toxoplasmosis is mainly based on serological tests latex agglutination test (LAT). Detection of specific DNA seems to be of clinical value in the ingestion of patients infected with toxoplasmosis. In this study, latex agglutination test was used for the detection of the antibodies against Toxoplasma gondii and Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) based on the amplification of repetitive B1 gene of T. gondii. The study was based on a total of 200 samples involving 50 butchers, 50 buffalo's sera and whole blood respectively. LAT established an overall infection of T. gondii in butchers and buffaloes as 20 % and 22 % respectively. The PCR analysis confirmed this T. gondii prevalence in butchers and buffaloes. LAT proved to be an efficacious method for routine serological screening for antibodies to T. gondii. The costly and sophisticated PCR results in our investigation showed good correlation with the serological data of these patients showing that LAT can be used as an alternation to PCR. The results demonstrated that PCR analysis of clinical samples of patients suspective for acute toxoplasmosis including those with an acquired infection presented by lymphadenopathy can be a promising diagnostic method that enables direct detection of parasitic DNA ER -