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Brucellosis is widespread in Ethiopia with variable reported prevalence depending on the geographical area, husbandry practices and animal species. However, there is limited information on the disease prevalence amongst pastoral communities, whose life is intricately linked with their livestock.

We conducted an integrated human-animal brucellosis sero-surveillance study in two adjacent pastoral regions, Afar and Somali region (SRS). This cross-sectional study included 13 woredas (districts) and 650 households. Blood samples were collected from people and livestock species (cattle, camel, goats and sheep). Sera were analyzed with C-ELISA for camels and shoats (sheep and goats), with I-ELISA for cattle and IgG ELISA for humans. Descriptive and inferential statistics analyses were performed.

A total of 5469 sera were tested by ELISA. Prevalence of livestock was 9.0% in Afar and 8.6% in SRS (ranging from 0.6 to 20.2% at woreda level). In humans, prevalence was 48.3% in Afar and 34.9% in SRS (ranging from 0.0 to 74.5% at woreda level). 68.4% of all households in Afar and 57.5% of households in SRS had at least one animal reactor. Overall, 4.1% of animals had a history of abortion. The proportion of animals with abortion history was higher in seropositive animals than in seronegative animals. Risk factor analysis showed that female animals were significantly at higher risk of being reactors (p = 0.013). Among the species, cattle had the least risk of being reactors (p = 0.014). In humans, there was a clear regional association of disease prevalence (p = 0.002). The older the people, the highest the …