Importance Of Serial Dilution In Serology

This concept is evidently applicable for febrile reactions as well. In biostatistics, the lowering of the prevalence of a disease in a given population invariably generates a proportional decrease in the predictive diagnostic values for a lab assay. However, there are still endemic zones, mainly for the salmonella and brucella bacterias. Today, even though eradication of these ailments has not been accomplished, it has been significantly lowered. Consequently, these infectious diseases had a high prevalence. When these assays were initially implemented, sanitary conditions in our country were poor. They were undoubtedly of great use in the past however, for more than 30 years, they have been substituted by other methodologies, and are now a part of the history of medicine. Nowadays febrile reactions are within the group of assays considered obsolete. The presence of fever in the clinical picture of all these infectious ailments was the origin of the “febrile reactions” denomination and the “febrile agglutinins panel” concept for patients with fever of unknown origin both terms are semantically and clinically inappropriate. For almost 100 years, these studies were used for the diagnosis of diseases caused by the salmonella bacteria, such as typhoid and paratyphoid fever (Widal reaction) and brucellosis (Huddleston reaction), as well as for the detection of some diseases caused by rickettsias (Weil–Felix reaction in Proteus OX19 infections). They are still used in developing countries because of their speed and technically ease of application, as well as their low cost.

Febrile reactions are a group of serological agglutination assays which originated in the beginning of the last century.

Importance Of Serial Dilution In Serology