Evaluation of rapid tests for the diagnosis of transmissible spongiform encephalopathies in sheep and goats.

In accordance with EU Regulation 999/2001, rapid tests already adopted for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE; Prionics Check Western, Platelia-BSE and Enfer TSE) are to be applied in all European countries to a sub-population of over 18-month-old slaughtered or dead sheep and goats to improve Scrapie surveillance and to determine the possible presence of BSE in sheep; however, the three tests have thus far been evaluated only for BSE and no official data are available about their performances on Scrapie. We evaluated the accuracy of these methods for TSE diagnosis in Italian sheep and goats, using a pre-homogenisation protocol on brain-stem samples to obtain comparable data from the three tests. Our results show that the tests can be considered reliable tools for active surveillance in the small ruminants population.