Neutralization Activity of Patient Sera Collected during the 2008-2009 Chikungunya Outbreak in Thailand

Chikungunya virus (CHIKV) infection typically causes fever, rash, myalgia, and arthralgia and sometimes results in recurrent joint pain or, in severe cases, neurological disorders or death. How CHIKV infection leads to prolonged or severe symptoms is still not well understood. In this study, we examined the neutralization (NT) titer of 98 serum samples collected from patients during the 2008-2009 chikungunya outbreak in Thailand. While all serum samples showed neutralizing activity, virus was detected in 58% of the serum samples. When we analyzed a possible association between virus and antibody titers and the presence of typical symptoms of CHIKV infection, fever and joint pain, there was no significant association except that the number of patients with fever was over three times more than the number of those without fever when CHIKV was detectable in serum. This study indicates that although neutralizing antibody is critical to eliminate CHIKV, it appears not to be the main factor associated with clinical symptoms in some cases, so that other aspects of immune responses, such as those involving proinflammatory mediators and adaptive immune cells, should be considered altogether.