Roadmap for development of diagnostic tests for helminths

What are we trying to achieve and why? What is the problem we are trying to solve?

• Improve rapidity,sensitivity,accuracy and repeatability of fecal egg count methods for the various helminth infections of veterinary importance that enable sustainable parasite control methods such as targeted (selective) treatment approaches.
• Update guidelines for FEC/FECRT performance and interpretation.

What are the scientific and technological challenges (knowledge gaps needing to be addressed)?

• FEC methods are labour intensive, costly and so insufficiently used for infection monitoring.
• Quality assurance between different operators and labs is difficult
• FEC in some host species such as for cattle nematodes and fluke are insensitive and inaccurate measures of infection intensities.
• Liver fluke faecal egg counts need further validation for composite samples.
• Use of composite samples in liver fluke FECRT other than for triclabendazole in sheep.

What approaches could/should be taken to address the research question?

• Develop, deliver and disseminate the use of pooled samples for infection and drug efficacy monitoritnfg
• Development of field-applicable kits for FEC/FECR tests to quantify helminth infection, anthelmintic efficacy and AR.
• Development of automated systems for FEC/FECRT.
• Development of Smartphone technologies and Apps for FEC and FECRT

What else needs to be done before we can solve this need?

Development of an image-analysis software able to identify and count helminth eggs in order to reduce the time required for the analysis and the human errors.

Existing knowledge including successes and failures

In an era of technological revolutions in the diagnostic industries, diagnostic methods for parasitic helminth infections are also evolving, for instance through the use of pooled samples, point￾of-care diagnosis and automation of faecal egg count (FEC) and FEC reduction (FECR) tests for assessing helminth infections and anthelmintic resistance.
The use of pooled samples from sheep and cattle for herd monitoring of fluke infection has been evaluated and published. Further validation for using pooled faecal samples to assess herd level nematode infections is required.