Background: Diarrhea is a significant cause of morbidity and mortality in many African countries, especially among immunocompromised patients and under five years children. Over the last decade, the protozoan parasite cryptosporidium spp has been shown to be a significant cause of gastro-enteritis in the immunocompetent and immunocompromised patients in both the developed and developing world. Objective: Evaluation and compara-tive study of coproantigen detection by ELISA with MZN in diagnosis of cryptosporidiosis in diarrheic chil-dren.
Materials and Methods: 80 diarrheic children Including 40 Immunocom-promised diarrheic children and 40 Immunocompetent diarrheic children, ranging in the age from three months to five years were examined and stool samples were collected.The stool sam-ples were examined for detection of Cryptosporidium oocysts using MZN and ELISA.
Results: Cryptosporidial infection rate was higher in immunocompromised children (20% by ELISA and 7.5% by
MZN) than in immunocompetent chil-dren (7.5% by ELISA and 0% by MZN) also ,among the whole 80 diar-rheic cases included in the study, three cases only were positive by MZN, while positivity was in 11 cases by ELISA. The sensitivity of ELISA was 100% and the specificity was 86% while the negative predictive value was 100% and positive predictive value 27.27%. These results showed that, ELISA is a good sensitive method es-pecially as a negative predictive one for detection of C. parvum compared with MZN.
Conclusion: The results showed that, ELISA is a good sensitive method es-pecially as a negative predictive one for detection of C. parvum compared with MZN.
INTRODUCTION
Intestinal opportunistic parasitic infections are the most important causes of diarrhea which is a serious health problem in tropical regions (Kumar et al., 2002). Protozoan parasite, Crypto-sporidium parvum, is an important op-portunistic parasite inducing diarrhea (Pillai and Kain,1999).
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