Diagnosis of Brucellosis in Humans: a Review

Diagnosis of brucellosis presents a challenge to the clinician and diagnostic lab alike. It is one of those diseases with “protean” manifestations and can mimic other diseases clinically thus posing a challenge to clinical diagnosis. Thus lab diagnosis is essential. In the lab, the “gold standard” remains isolation in culture but this takes a long time, requires biosafety level 2 during handling and is one of the highly reported hazards to laboratory personnel. Diagnosis therefore is most commonly done by serological tests, but these are not the most sensitive and specific and require standardization for different populations depending on level of endemicity. Newer diagnostic approaches such as PCR are still being studied and have not yet been approved for diagnostic purposes. In this review, these different approaches are tackled.