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Immunoprevalence to Six Waterborne Pathogens in Beachgoers at Boquerón Beach, Puerto Rico: Application of a Microsphere-Based Salivary Antibody Multiplex Immunoassay
Citation:
Augustine, S., K. Simmons, T. Eason, C. Curioso, S. Griffin, Tim Wade, A. Dufour, Shay Fout, A. Grimm, K. Oshima, E. Sams, MaryJean See, AND L. Wymer. Immunoprevalence to Six Waterborne Pathogens in Beachgoers at Boquerón Beach, Puerto Rico: Application of a Microsphere-Based Salivary Antibody Multiplex Immunoassay. Frontiers in Public Health. Frontiers, Lausanne, Switzerland, 5(84):1-11, (2017).
Impact/Purpose:
The multiplexed immunoassay presented here, together with the cut-off points established, allowed us to measure immunoprevalence rates and co-infections to six waterborne pathogens among beachgoers in Puerto Rico. A follow-up study will explore incident infections and attempt to elucidate the sources and health effects of exposure. Future work will exploit these techniques to examine exposure patterns in other communities. This assay, along with the approaches presented here, may enhance our knowledge and understanding of environmental microbial pathogenesis and assist risk assessment modelers.
Description:
Waterborne infectious diseases are a major public health concern worldwide. Few methods have been established that are capable of measuring human exposure to multiple waterborne pathogens simultaneously using non-invasive samples such as saliva. Most current methods measure exposure to only one pathogen at a time, require large volumes of individual samples collected using invasive procedures, and are very labor intensive. In this article, we applied a multiplex bead-based immunoassay capable of measuring IgG antibody responses to six waterborne pathogens simultaneously in human saliva to estimate immunoprevalence in beachgoers at Boquerón Beach, Puerto Rico. Further, we present approaches for determining cutoff points to assess immunoprevalence to the pathogens in the assay. For the six pathogens studied, our results show that IgG antibodies against antigens from noroviruses GI.I and GII.4 were more prevalent (60 and 51.6%, respectively) than Helicobacter pylori (21.4%), hepatitis A virus (20.2%), Campylobacter jejuni (8.7%), and Toxoplasma gondii (8%) in the saliva of the study participants. The salivary antibody multiplex immunoassay can be used to examine immunoprevalence of specific pathogens in human populations.
