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Background
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Listeria monocytogenes is a facultative intracellular Gram-positive food-borne bacterium, increasingly recognized as being responsible for severe infections in both animals and humans. Ingestion of contaminated food causes an infection, named listeriosis, which affects especially immunocompromised patients, new-borns and pregnant women and is characterized by a variety of severe syndromes, such as encephalitis, meningoencephalitis, septicemia and abortion. Listeriolysin O (LLO), a major virulence factor produced by all pathogenic strains of L. monocytogenes, has been identified as a candidate antigen for a serological assay. Antibodies to LLO have been already detected in the serum of goats, sheep, lambs, cows and humans by western blot, dot blot or ELISA analysis. (...more...)The kit does not show cross reactivity with interfering antibodies present usually in the sera of pregnant women.
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