Hepatitis C virus : prevalence in Lebanese blood donors and brief overview of the disease.

Hepatitis C virus (HCV) is recognized as the major cause of non-A, non-B hepatitis. Its prevalence in different patient populations and blood donors has been reported worldwide but not yet from Lebanon. This study was performed to determine the prevalence of HCV antibodies in 536 random Lebanese blood donors using three enzyme immunoassay kits: ETI-AB-HCVK (Sorin, Biomedica, Italy), UBI HCV EIA (Organon Teknika, Netherlands) and ORTHO HCV 2.0 ELISA (Ortho Diagnostic Systems, USA). The latter was also used as an arbitrator test. Though ETI-AB-HCVK and UBI HCV EIA kits gave higher initial positive results (5.8% and 3.7%, respectively) than ORTHO HCV 2.0 ELISA (1.1%), the over all prevalence of HCV antibody in these blood donors was 0.7%. A brief review of the HCV virus, its epidemiology, clinical features and diagnostic aspects is also presented. A similar testing approach was carried out on additional 3643 blood donors. Confirmatory testing based on CHIRON*RIBA*HCV 2.0 strip immunoblot assay (Ortho) revealed that the HCV antibody seroprevalence in random Lebanese blood donors is 0.11% and not 0.7% as found by ELISAs alone.