Abstract
Hepatitis E virus (HEV) is highly endemic in several African countries with high mortality rate among pregnant women. Nothing is known about the circulation of this virus in central Africa. We evaluated therefore the prevalence of anti-HEV IgG in samples collected from pregnant women living in the five main cities of Gabon, central Africa. We found that 14.1% (119/840) of pregnant women had anti-HEV IgG. The prevalence differed between regions and between age groups. In 391 newly collected samples from the region where the highest prevalence was found, a significant difference (p < 0.05) in seroprevalence was found between rural (6.4%) and urban (13.5%) areas. These data provide evidence of a high prevalence of HEV in Gabon, providing indirect evidence of past contact with this virus.
Highlights
Hepatitis E virus (HEV) is an enterically transmitted pathogen and is responsible for recent large-scale epidemics of hepatitis around the world, as reported recently in Uganda http://www.promedmail.org, where more than 7500 cases were registered in 1 year [1]
HEV induces selflimiting or acute hepatitis, and the severity can varied from no symptoms to fulminating infection [2]
HEV infections have not been known to become chronic [2]; recently, persistent HEV infection, with chronic hepatitis and cirrhosis, has been reported in patients with reduced immune surveillance induced by chemotherapy or post-transplant immune suppression [3,4]
Summary
Hepatitis E virus (HEV) is an enterically transmitted pathogen and is responsible for recent large-scale epidemics of hepatitis around the world, as reported recently in Uganda http://www.promedmail.org, where more than 7500 cases were registered in 1 year [1]. In the absence of outbreaks, the HEV prevalence in rural populations was 4.4% in Ghana, 14.0% in Burundi, 15.3% in South Africa and 67.7% in Egypt, with a seroprevalence of up to 84.3% among pregnant women [13,14,15,16].
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