Seroprevelance of Bovine Brucellosis in the Nile Delta Region, Egypt: A Preliminary Study

There is currently an obvious discrepancy between the officially reported data for seroprevalence of human and animal Brucellosis in Egypt and the data obtained from scientific reports. The present study gives a preliminary data about the seroprevalence of Brucella infection in dairy cattle herds from three large Egyptian Governorates located in the Nile Delta region. The study population consisted of 2.830 dairy cattle from private farms in Dakahlia, Damietta and Port-Said Governorates. Serum samples were randomly collected from 811 cows (203 animals showed reproductive disorders group 1); while 608 cows were apparently healthy (group 2). The collected sera were tested by Rose Bengal Test (RBT), Enzyme Linked Immunosorbant Assay (ELISA) and Fluorescent Polarization Assay (FPA). The overall seroprevelance among the tested cows in the first group was 52.2% (106/203). ELISA showed the highest number of positive reactors (n = 138; 67.9%) followed by FPA (n = 120; 59.11%) and RBT (n = 109; 53.7%); while in group 2, the number of positive animals were 25 (4.2%), 20 (3.3%) and 11 (1.8%) by using RBT, ELISA and FPA, respectively. It is very likely that brucellosis Could poses a great risk to consumers in the study region and Could be a potential source of infection to animal keepers, veterinarians and slaughterhouse workers. Further studies are warranted to unravel the epidemiological situation of human, animal and environmental brucellosis in other regions of Egypt.