Molecular Diagnosis of Chikungunya virus (CHIKV) and Dengue virus (DENV) and its concomitant circulation in South Indian population

Abstract

Concomitant circulation of dengue and chikungunya viruses has been sporadically reported and needs to be individually diagnosed. Several sensitive molecular diagnostics are currently deployed for the diagnosis of both DENV and CHIKV, it is very difficult to delineate the two viral infections based on symptomology, as both share similar clinical presentation. Due to the overlapping nature of clinical signs in DENV and CHIKV infections, there is an urgent need for early and accurate diagnosis to avoid outbreaks aimed at initiating disease specific interventions. The study encompasses the diagnosis of clinically suspected 1024 DENV/CHIKV patient samples which were collected from AndhraPradesh (AP) and Kerala, India by using in-house developed RT-PCR (reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction). The results show 43.8% DENV RNA infection and32% CHIKV RNA infection of the total samples obtained from AP. In contrast, samples from Kerala show dengue infection of 16.1%, CHIKV infection of 2.3%. In our study, we found that 23%, 0.1% of the samples were concomitant circulation for CHIKV/DENV in AP and Kerala respectively, suggesting the co-infection of these two viruses.