Comparison of two PCR systems for the rapid detection of Leptospira spp. from kidney tissue.

In this study we compared two routine PCR systems for the detection of Leptospira spp. and assessed their performance when directly applied to kidney samples from small mammals. Although the kappa value of 0.9 indicated a high level of agreement between the tests, the outer membrane lipoprotein gene lipl32 based PCR was more robust and showed a higher number of positive kidney samples.