Vaccine Does Not Complicate Diagnosis Of Active Disease.(OspA Lyme disease vaccine)

2001 MAR 7 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) --

by Michelle Marble, staff medical writer -- A dot blot test will be able to distinguish active disease from antibodies produced in response to the OspA Lyme disease vaccine, researchers say.

Recipients of the OspA Lyme vaccine often test positive for Lyme disease even when they are not infected, so it is important to be able to differentiate active infection from antibody responses based on vaccination.

Paul T. Fawcett and colleagues from the A.I. duPont Hospital for Children believe they have a way to do that. They published their findings in the journal Clinical and Diagnostic Laboratory Immunology

"This study evaluated the effects of vaccination with OspA on the use of serologic tests as aids in the diagnosis of Lyme borreliosis," said Fawcett and colleagues. "Sera from control and OspA-immunized mice and from OspA-immunized human volunteers were tested for serologic reactivity to Borrelia burgdorferi."

The researchers tested blood samples obtained from persons prior to the administration of the Lyme vaccine and at 30 days following administration of the first and second dose of the OspA vaccine.

They used several assays to assess serologic reactivity, including an in-house-developed enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), an in-house-developed Western blot assay, two commercial Western blot tests, and a commercially available dot blot assay.