Diagnostic Tools Against Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis Infection in Animals: A Review

Paratuberculosis or Johne's disease is a chronic, infectious, granulomatous enteropathy caused in domestic and wild ruminants by Mycobacterium avium subsp. paratuberculosis (Map). Johne's disease causes huge production losses and has high impact on animal industry. The control programmes are hampered by the lack of simple and efficient diagnostic tests, especially for subclinically infected animals. Various diagnostic tools are available like fecal culture techniques, culturing, radioisotyping, PCR based methods, serological approaches (Cell mediated assay and humoral based) and most new area are recombinant antigens based detection which can open a novel approach for early detection of the disease.