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Epidemiology of hepatitis B in Tunisia: retrospective study in 198157 blood donors in military environment

Introduction

Hepatitis B is endemic in Tunisia. His prevalence was evaluated at 5.5% in 1990. The aim of this study is to estimate the prevalence of this disease in the last years in Tunisia.

Methods

it was a retrospective study about all the blood donors in the Military Center of Blood Transfusion between 2000 and 2011.

The Ag HBs was systematic for every blood donation, by immuno-enzymatic reaction.

Results

In this period, 198157 blood donors were compiled. These donors were, for 95%, young men, between 20 and 25 years, from all the parts of the country.

This study showed:

  • A net decrease in prevalence of hepatitis B in 12 years: from 3.54% in 2000 to 0.8% in 2011.

  • A regional disparity of this prevalence.

  • No identification of a population at risk.

  • The improvement of hygiene and the use of disposable syringes in hospitals can explain this decrease of the prevalence; HVB vaccination began in 1995 and didn’t affect the sample of the study.

Conclusion

Hepatitis B is still a public health problem in Tunisia. Vaccination and better socio-economic condition will lead in short term to the decrease of the HVB prevalence, started since the 90’s.

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This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

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Khoufi, M., Mrabet, A., Nsiri, B. et al. Epidemiology of hepatitis B in Tunisia: retrospective study in 198157 blood donors in military environment. BMC Infect Dis 14 (Suppl 2), P16 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2334-14-S2-P16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2334-14-S2-P16

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