Skip to main content
  • Poster presentation
  • Open access
  • Published:

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.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Rights and permissions

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.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

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://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.1186/1471-2334-14-S2-P16

Download citation

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.1186/1471-2334-14-S2-P16

Keywords