RESUMO
A study was carried out to determine the prevalence of Hepatitis C virus (HCV) in Mumbai among certain high risk groups such as renal transplant recipients, multitransfused and haemodialysis patients; professional and voluntary blood donors and viral hepatitis cases for comparison. Repeated testing of 602 subjects for antibodies to HCV using a second generation ELISA assay (Abbott, USA) showed an overall prevalence of 16.9%. We found 36.4% of multitransfused patients, 27.8% of renal failure cases and 26.2% of renal transplant recipients to be seropositive. Voluntary blood donors in our series showed a surprisingly high prevalence of 15.9%, and this group needs further investigation. Fifty-six of these sera (of which 45 were anti-HCV positive) were tested for HCV RNA by PCR and 14(31.1%) of the seropositive samples were also HCV RNA positive. The present investigation not only shows a high prevalence of HCV in the study groups but also proves the presence of HCV genomes in a significant proportion.