Durre Shahwar Lone, Shahbaz Aman, Maleeha Aslam.
Prevalence of Hepatitis C Virus antibody in Blood Donors of Lahore.
Biomedica Jan ;15:103-7.

The present study was designed to rind out the prevalence of HCV antibody in blood donor population of Lahore. Now a days, HCV has been indentified as the major causative agent of transfusion associated non-A, non-B hepatitis, and circulating antibodies of HCV have been found to reflect persistent infection rather immunity. Sera of 186 blood donors were tested for anti-HCV by ELISA, the kit used was that of Abott HCV (r-DNA). Out of 186 sera, 8 (43%) were reactive for HCV, the age range was between 16-55 yrs. The maximum sero-positivity was shown in age group 26 to 35 yrs (4.8%). The overall, prevalence of positivity was found to be twice as high in females (83%) than in males (4.0%), which was statistically in-significant. Risk factors like history of blood donations in last six months, showed 5.26% positivity rate in donors who had donated blood on previous occassions, than in index donation. Only 37.5% (3/8) HCV positive cases gave a past history of hepatitis; 12.5% positive cases gave history of exposure to other hepatitis patients; while 2.8% of HCV negative donors also gave history of contact, but the number was too small to calculate any significance. Only one HCV positive donor (125%) gave history of undergoing invasive proceedure like injections. Two more donors gave similar history of procedures but were HCV negative.

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