engleski

Isolation of hepatitis G virus in Croatia

Hepatitis G virus (HGV) as a member of the family Flaviviridae, detected in human blood, is a possible cause of post-transfusion hepatitis. The aim of the study was to determine the prevalence of HGV viremia in a group of randomly selected blood donors, two high-risk groups exposed to parenteral virus transmission (hemodialysis patients and hemophiliacs), and a group of patients with non-A-E hepatitis. After reverse transcription, the HGV-RNA was amplified using two pairs of oligonucleotide primers from the 5'-untranslated region. In the group of 98 blood donors, the presence of HGV-RNA in serum was demonstrated in two (2.0 %) subjects. In the group of 430 hemodialysis patients, HGV viremia was recorded in 67 (15.3%) patients, and in the group of 95 hemophiliacs hepatitis G virus was detected in 12 (12.6%) patients. In the group of 64 non-A-E hepatitis patients, seven (10.9%) patients were HGV-RNA positive. Single-strand conformation polymorphism (SSCP) analysis of DNA revealed various conformation patterns, pointing to heterogeneity of isolate sequences in the study sample. The sequencing of 343 nucleotides of 5'-untranslated region, comparison with the known GeneBank sequences, and phylogenetic tree construction showed all isolates to belong to the 2a genotype, which is most widely spread over Western Europe and North America.

Hepatitis G virus; parenteral transmission; RT-PCR; SSCP; cycle sequencing; phylogenetic tree

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