COMPARISON OF HCV PREVALENCE IN PAKISTAN AND IRAN, AN INSIGHT INTO FUTURE (LETTER)

摘要

Dear Editor: A recent report by Shakeri et al. (March, 2013) published in Hepatitis Monthly showed that HCV prevalence is 0.2% in Mashad, Iran (1). Moreover, Previous report from Iran showed the similar prevalence of HCV in voluntaries blood donors (2). Pakistan, a neighboring country of Iran, is a low socioeconomic country having more than 10 million HCV infected people (3). Recently we have published the prevalence of HCV among 62, 251 healthy blood donors from North West Province of Pakistan. The study showed that 2.6% of healthy individuals were HCV antibody positive (4). We also concluded that the HCV prevalence is increasing with time when the results were compared with other previous reports.