approaches to diagnose active OV infection: i.e., urine OV-ES assay. Here, we adopted anti- body approach using the non-invasive sample matrix (urine) in an easily applied assay that could be used to determine OV infection in these new epidemiological circumstances.
In our study, the effects of four treatment protocols on urine specimens were compared. The TCA-treated urine yielded higher OD values in the urine OV-ES assay, with a greater dis- criminatory power between “known OV positive” and “known OV negative” samples than when urine was treated by freezing, heating, or alkaline prior to use in the urine OV-ES assay. These data confirm findings in a recent copro-antigen analysis that also utilized anti-OV-ES antibodies for the detection of opisthorchiasis [17]. The pre-treatment with TCA has been also successfully added to serum and urine samples to precipitate out the interfering proteins for successful antigen detection in schistosomiasis [24, 30, 31].