Meningococcal Serology

Meningococcal serology has been mainly used over the last 20 years in the field of vaccinology, to evaluate candidate vaccines and quantify individuals’ immune responses. With the increasing usage of pre-admission antibiotic treatment (1 ), nonculture diagnostic methods such as polymerase chain reaction (PCR) (Chapter 3 ), antigen detection (Chapter 4 ), and serology have become important tools. Nonculture diagnosis of meningococcal disease is rapidly becoming of equal importance for the confirmation of meningococcal infection as the isolation of Neisseria meningitidis organisms (2 ). This has occurred at a time when accurate case ascertainment of meningococcal disease has become a crucial aspect of assessing effectiveness of the recently introduced serogroup C polysaccharide-protein conjugate vaccine in the UK (3 ). N. meningitidis polysaccharide vaccines have been available for over 20 years (4 ) and evaluation of candidate vaccines and assessment of levels of antibody requires accurate and reproducible assays.