Canine
brucellosis is a contagious disease with venereal and oral modes of transmission that produces late abortion in females, epididymides and prostates in males. Diagnosis is difficult because of unstable serum antibody titers that vary from individual to individual as well as between different methods used for their detection. The objective of this work was to evaluate the clinical utility of the immunochromatographic assay (ICA) for serodiagnosis of dogs suspected of having
brucellosis, and results were compared with those obtained for hemoculture (HC) and the rapid screening agglutination with
2-mercaptoethanol (2-ME RSAT). The all experimentally infected dogs were positive in ICA, HC and
2-ME RSAT from 5 weeks, 7 weeks, and 3 weeks after
infection, respectively. Also, among dogs selected from 10 different breed kennels occurred
brucellosis, 24.8%, 39.5% and 39.1% of dogs tested were detected as positive with HC,
2-ME RSAT and ICA, respectively. The kappa value between
2-ME RSAT and ICA was 0.89. The results of this study showed that sensitivity and specificity of the ICA are comparable with those obtained using conventional serological and bacteriological test for
brucellosis. In conclusion, the ICA kit provides a handy and accurate tool for the rapid serodiagnosis of canine
brucellosis.