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Brucellosis (Brucella spp.)
2010 Case Definition

NOTE: A surveillance case definition is a set of uniform criteria used to define a disease for public health surveillance. Surveillance case definitions enable public health officials to classify and count cases consistently across reporting jurisdictions. Surveillance case definitions are not intended to be used by healthcare providers for making a clinical diagnosis or determining how to meet an individual patient’s health needs.

CSTE Position Statement(s)

  • 09-ID-14

Clinical Description

An illness characterized by acute or insidious onset of fever and one or more of the following: night sweats, arthralgia, headache, fatigue, anorexia, myalgia, weight loss, arthritis/spondylitis, meningitis, or focal organ involvement (endocarditis, orchitis/epididymitis, hepatomegaly, splenomegaly).

Laboratory Criteria for Diagnosis

Definitive

  • Culture and identification of Brucella spp. from clinical specimens
  • Evidence of a fourfold or greater rise in Brucella antibody titer between acute- and convalescent-phase serum specimens obtained greater than or equal to 2 weeks apart
Presumptive
  • Brucella total antibody titer of greater than or equal to 160 by standard tube agglutination test (SAT) or Brucella microagglutination test (BMAT) in one or more serum specimens obtained after onset of symptoms
  • Detection of Brucella DNA in a clinical specimen by PCR assay

Case Classification

Probable

A clinically compatible illness with at least one of the following:

  • Epidemiologically linked to a confirmed human or animal brucellosis case
  • Presumptive laboratory evidence, but without definitive laboratory evidence, of Brucella infection

Confirmed

A clinically compatible illness with definitive laboratory evidence of Brucella infection




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