The objective of this study was to evaluate the feasibility of using pooled serum samples for detection of PRRSV-infected sow herds by ELISA. In order to achieve this objective, 113 true positive samples and 100 false positive samples were tested undiluted and diluted 1:2, 1:4, 1:6, 1:8 and 1:10 in negative sera to estimate the effect of pooling on the accuracy of the ELISA test. Results show that pooling of a single truly positive sample with negative samples may result in an ELISA negative test and false negative result. However, this dilution effect can also decrease the likelihood false positive results, compared to testing individual samples. Furthermore, we found that by pooling samples and increasing the number of animals sampled, we can increase the accuracy of the monitoring protocol at the same testing costs. Therefore, the conventional monitoring protocols based on ELISA on individual samples can be improved by using pooling.
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