BACKGROUND In the last few decades, Romania has been considered one of the European countries most affected by animal rabies, but a combination of oral rabies vaccination (ORV) campaigns in foxes alongside mandatory vaccination of pets has substantially decreased the number of rabies cases in recent years. The objective of this study was to detect rabies antibodies in wild boar serum and thoracic fluid samples collected during the hunting season after ORV campaigns in north-eastern Romania in order to identify if wild boars are substantial competitors to foxes for ORV baits. RESULTS When the 312 wild boar samples were tested by ELISA (BioPro ELISA, Czech Republic), 42.31% (132/312) demonstrated rabies antibodies. In order to compare these wild boar results in terms of the percentage of immunisation, fox samples were also included in the study, and in this case only 28.40% (98/345) demonstrated rabies antibodies by ELISA. To check the diagnostic sensitivity and specificity of this ELISA, those samples with a sufficient volume from both species that had tested either negative or positive with an initial ELISA were then tested with the Fluorescent Antibody Virus Neutralisation (FAVN) assay. The overall concordance between the BioPro ELISA and FAVN test was 74.26% (75/101) in wild boar samples and 65.66% (65/99) in fox samples, 140 out of 200 samples being correlated with the two methods, although no significant statistical difference (p = 0.218) between the two species was registered. We found a good agreement by both tests for the ELISA-positive samples (91.30%), however the situation was different for the ELISA-negative samples, where a low agreement was demonstrated (41.18%). CONCLUSIONS This study reports for the first time the presence of rabies antibodies in wild boar samples collected during the hunting season in Romania after ORV campaigns in rabies endemic areas. It is also the first study to demonstrate that ELISA BioPro can be used on wild boar samples with satisfactory results compared to the FAVN test for this species.

中文翻译：

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通过狂犬病ELISA试验检测罗马尼亚东北部野猪中的狂犬病抗体。

背景技术在过去的几十年中，罗马尼亚被认为是受动物狂犬病影响最严重的欧洲国家之一，但是狐狸口服狂犬病疫苗接种（ORV）运动与宠物的强制性疫苗接种相结合，大大减少了最近的狂犬病病例数年。这项研究的目的是在罗马尼亚东北部进行ORV运动后的狩猎季节采集的野猪血清和胸液样本中检测狂犬病抗体，以确定野猪是否是ORV诱饵的狐狸的主要竞争者。结果当通过ELISA（BioPro ELISA，捷克共和国）对312个野猪样品进行检测时，有42.31％（132/312）的狂犬病抗体表现出来。为了比较这些野猪结果的免疫百分比，该研究中还包括了狐狸样品，在这种情况下，只有28.40％（98/345）的ELISA方法显示出狂犬病抗体。为了检查此ELISA的诊断敏感性和特异性，然后使用荧光抗体病毒中和（FAVN）测定法对来自两个物种的足够体积的样品进行初始ELISA阴性或阳性检测。野猪样品中BioPro ELISA与FAVN检测之间的总体一致性为74.26％（75/101），狐狸样品中为65.66％（65/99），尽管在这200种样品中有140种与这两种方法相关，但无统计学意义记录了两个物种之间的差异（p = 0.218）。两种检测方法对ELISA阳性样品的检测结果均显示出良好的一致性（91.30％），但对于ELISA阴性样品的检测结果却有所不同，显示出较低的一致性（41.18％）。结论这项研究首次报告了在狂犬病流行地区开展ORV运动后，罗马尼亚在狩猎季节采集的野猪样本中存在狂犬病抗体。这也是首次证明ELISA BioPro可用于野猪样品，与该物种的FAVN测试相比，结果令人满意。