BACKGROUND:Hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection was long considered an important public health concern in Burkina Faso and still represents a major cause of liver cancer and cirrhosis in the active population. To counter the problem, a national strategic plan was developed and adopted in July 2017 to coordinate viral hepatitis elimination's efforts. However evidence to support its implementation remains scanty and scattered. The main purpose of this study was to summarize available information from per-reviewed articles published over the last two decades to accurately estimate the prevalence of HBV infection in Burkina Faso.METHODS:We conducted a systematic search with meta-analysis of scientific articles using Science-Direct, Web-of-Science, PubMed/Medline, and Google Scholar. We systematically assessed all relevant publications that measured the prevalence of hepatitis B surface antigen and which were published between 1996 and 2017. We estimated the national HBV prevalence and its 95% confident interval. We subsequently adjusted the meta-analysis to possible sources of heterogeneity.RESULTS:We retrieved and analyzed a total of 22 full text papers including 99,672 participants. The overall prevalence was 11.21%. The prevalence after adjustment were 9.41%, 11.11%, 11.73% and 12.61% in the general population, pregnant women, blood donors and HIV-positive persons respectively. The prevalence was higher before implementation of HBV universal vaccination and decreased from 12.80% between 1996 and 2001 to 11.11% between 2012 and 2017. The prevalence was also higher in rural area 17.35% than urban area 11.11%. The western regions were more affected with 12.69% than the central regions 10.57%. The prevalence was 14.66% in the boucle of Mouhoun region and 14.59 in the center-west region. Aggregate data were not available for the other regions.CONCLUSIONS:HBV has clearly an important burden in Burkina Faso as described by its high prevalence and this problem significantly challenges the national health care system. There is an urgent need for effective public health interventions to eliminate the problem. However, higher quality data are needed to produce reliable epidemiological estimates that will guide control efforts towards the achievement of the national strategic plan's goals.
Hepatitis B virus (HBV) infections represent one of the major public health problems in global context. More than 2 billion people in the world have been infected with this virus at some point of time in their life and millions are chronically infected, indicating that chronic HBV-infected subjects remain as a living source of HBV transmission. The public health impact of this is tremendous. Considerable numbers of chronic HBV-infected individuals would eventually develop progressive liver diseases and their complications like hepatic failure, liver cirrhosis (LC), and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Epidemiological studies have suggested that about 0.6 to 1.2 million people die annually from HBV-related liver diseases. These figures about death due to HBV and sufferings from HBV-related diseases indicate a notion of medical emergencies about HBV. In addition to these, the impact of HBV on health care delivery system moves beyond these numbers of HBV-related patients and HB-related deaths. This is because significant insights have already been developed about epidemiology, virology, and pathogenesis of HBV. Also, an effective and widely used preventive vaccine is available against HBV. In addition to these, antiviral drugs against HBV have been developed from early 1980s and several such drugs are now available commercially in the open market around the worldwide. Unfortunately, the ongoing therapeutic regimens could not stand the test of time and new insights about HBV pathogenesis are required for the development of new, novel, and evidence-based therapies for chronic HBV infections. How to cite this article: Akbar SMF, Al-Mahtab M, Khan SI. Nature of Host Immunity during Hepatitis B Virus Infection and designing Immune Therapy. Euroasian J Hepato-Gastroenterol 2018;8(1):42-46.
We found three pairs of six sporadic acute hepatitis E cases infected with three different genotype 3b hepatitis E virus (HEV) strains, which were 99.7%-100% identical between two cases in each pair within the partial nucleotide sequences of ORF1 and ORF2 regions of the HEV genome. While no common source of infection was recognized within each pair, HEV infections in these cases occurred within the same economic bloc in the central region of Japan. Moreover, nucleotide sequences of the HEV strains from one pair were 99.8% identical to those obtained from pig liver sold in the same economic bloc. These results suggest the importance of continued molecular epidemiologic studies on HEV strains from humans and food products.
Hepatitis C virus (HCV) exists as a cloud of closely related sequence variants called a quasispecies, rather than as a population of identical clones. To date there is no preventive vaccine and though antiviral therapy has been improved in the past few years the HCV cannot be eradicated in all patients as a result of its quasispecies nature due to lack of proof reading activities and high error rate of RNA-dependent RNA polymerase and the pressure exerted by host immune system. This review focuses on the genetic diversity and quasispecies nature of HCV viral genomes, and briefly reviews the principles of quasispecies dynamics and the differences with classical population genetics and discusses the biological implications of this phenomenon, focusing on the hepatitis C virus.Delta Med Col J. Jan 2018 6(1): 45-52
Mobilization of bone marrow-derived stem cells by granulocyte colony stimulating factor (G-CSF) supports hepatic regeneration and may augment clinical improvement in patients with acute-on-chronic liver failure (ACLF). The aim of this study is to assess the impact of G-CSF on complications and transplant-free survival in patients with ACLF.
