الفهرس 
Virology of HCVOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
It is believed that community acquisition in Egypt occurs as a result of the re-use of needles for injections in traditional or formal health care settings. However, it was difficult to obtain good information about re-use of needles, and a history of injections is ubiquitous and thus could not be used to identify those at higher risk for community acquisition. Generally experienced risk factors such as this are included in our models as part of the background risk for community acquisition, represented by the variable age.
The power of our analytical approach depends on the presence of a strong risk factor for community acquisition of disease that can provide information regarding which of the two partners is more likely to be the source of the disease. In this study, reporting of a parenteral risk factor was only moderately predictive of anti-HCV. Another risk factor in the model, age, was likely to be collinear between the husbands and wives, reducing its effectiveness in helping to probabilistically identify the source. The method might be more powerful in populations where there is a strong community risk factor such as intravenous drug abuse.
The probabilities of transmission estimated in this article are rather crude epidemiological parameters, indicating only the probability of transmission at any time between spouses. This necessarily averages over the duration of infectious exposure in the couples, the nature of contact between the couples, and the variability of infectiousness over time. More specific parameters could be estimated only if we knew the duration of infection, the duration of the marriage, the number of contacts, and other relevant information.
Egyptian children with infected parents are at high risk of infection with hepatitis C (HCV). Analysis of data collected during surveys of rural communities show children whose parents had antibodies to HCV (anti-HCV) were at higher risk for having anti-HCV than children whose parents did not. The association was greater with mothers than fathers and when the parent had HCV RNA. For instance, 87 (14%) of 612 children had anti-HCV whose mothers had HCV RNA compared with 28 (7%) of 401 whose mothers only had anti-HCV and 79 (2.6%) of 3,086 whose mothers were seronegative. These associations persisted after controlling for age, parenteral exposures, and serologic status of the other parent. Sequencing isolates from 13 families with parent(s) and children having HCV RNA showed 10 of 18 had genetically similar viruses. These findings suggest Egyptian children are at high risk of being infected with HCV by their parents and identification of the transmission routes would allow for preventive measures.