Background: Dengue being one of the most perilous viral disease with its ability to cause severe conditions often lead to a fatal outcome if not controlled at its initial acute stages. The nature of human antibody response to dengue virus (DENV) with its 4 serotypes as DENV-1, DENV-2, DENV-3 and DENV-4 plays a dominant role in deciding the outcome of the infection, the antibody mediated immune defense mechanisms is initiated with production of functional antibodies such as Immunoglobin G and Immunoglobin M (IgM), varying in concentrations with respect to the severity of the disease. This research focuses on the variations of such antibodies as it could give an insight into predicting the condition of patients for early detection and diagnosis of the disease. World health organization had suggested that the best method for both Qualitative and Quantitative antibody analysis is by using Enzyme Linked immunosorbent assay, since it has a specificity of 85.1% and sensitivity of 97.1% when detecting acute febrile conditions.

Methods: To carry out such a study with samples collected amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic, 13 inward patients at UH-KDU were selected with 07 samples from confirmed dengue patients and 06 from fever patients, a total volume of 6ml of blood was taken from each patient. Serum was obtained after centrifugation to identify the antibodies. ELISA was used to detect the antibody variation using the protocol of a previously done In-house ELISA. The optical density was used at a wavelength of 405nm. 2 positive and negative controls each were done for each ELISA plate used. Though statistical tests were not utilized, Scatter graphs were plotted based on the incidence and prevalence of the antibodies present in the positive dengue patients, within the 3 sample collection days based on the 4 serotypes. For this purpose, the mean of the dengue negative sample was used as a control with 1 standard deviation .

Conclusions: It was concluded that the results showed elevated levels of IgG than IgM suggesting that the patients were affected by secondary dengue infection within the months of September 2019 till February 2020, specifically of the serotypes 2 and 3. Incidence of Dengue and COVID-19 infection was found to have a positive correlation with the antibody levels. Though appropriate conclusions were made with the results obtained using the limited samples, future study with a larger sample number can contribute to a better validation of the results and essential statistical tests could be used to validate the conclusion.

Keywords; Functional Antibodies, Dengue, Serotypes