Authors

Discussion

Leptospirosis is an emerging infectious disease with worldwide distribution. An increase of human cases was reported recently however information on the main host reservoir, the rat and serovars circulating among the population is limited to which the present study was undertaken. Five urban cities were chosen as study sites with trapping commencing from October 2011 to February 2014. Microscopic agglutination test (MAT) and PCR was carried out to identify and determine the pathogenic status of the isolates while pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) and random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD)-PCR to characterize the isolates. Three species were identified from 357 rats captured with Rattus rattus the more dominant rat species (80%). Only 11.0% were positive through culture and confirmed pathogenic Leptospira through molecular techniques.Two serogroups were distinguished  namely; L. borgpetersenii serogroup Javanica (n=16) and L. interrogans serogroup Bataviae (n=23). Pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) distinguished the two serovars in the urban rat populations:  L. borgpetersenii  serovar Javanica and L. interrogans  serovar Batavia. RAPD-PCR yielded 14 distinct patterns and was found to be more discriminative than PFGE.  Despite the low infection prevalence, this findings still highlight risk of exposure when coupled with extrinsic factors.