Distribution of antibody titer against Salmonella enterica among healthy individuals in nepal.docVIP

Annals of Clinical Microbiology and Antimicrobials BioMedCentral Research Open Access Distribution of antibody titer against Salmonella enterica among healthy individuals in nepal Bharat M Pokhrel?1, Rajendra Karmacharya?1, Shyam K Mishra?1 and Janak Koirala*?2 Address: 1Tribhuvan University, Institute of Medicine, Department of Microbiology, Maharajgunj, Kathmandu, Nepal and 2Southern Illinois University, School of Medicine, Department of Medicine, Division of Infectious Diseases Post Office Box – 19636 Springfield, Illinois 62794-9636 USA Email: Bharat M Pokhrel - bmp268@.np; Rajendra Karmacharya - bmp268@.np; Shyam K Mishra - bmp268@.np; Janak Koirala* - jkoirala@ * Corresponding author ?Equal contributors Published: 7 January 2009 Received: 13 March 2008 Accepted: 7 January 2009 Annals of Clinical Microbiology and Antimicrobials 2009, 8:1 doi:10.1186/1476-0711-8-1 This article is available from: /content/8/1/1 ? 2009 Pokhrel et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: Enteric fever is an endemic problem in Nepal and Widal agglutination test is widely used for its diagnosis but a normal baseline titer in healthy population and cutoff values have not been established. Methods: We measured average baseline antibody titers against O and H antigens of Salmonella enterica serotype Typhi and H antigens of serotypes Paratyphi A and Paratyphi B among apparently healthy blood donors in Nepal. The antibody titers were measured using Standard Widal Confirmatory Quantitative Tube test. Results: Among the 100 blood samples collected from healthy volunteers, 62 individuals had significant antibody titers (≥ 1:20) against one of the four antigens against S.