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Assessment of Pregnant Women Toxoplasmosis by ELISA Method in Miandoab City, Iran

2017; Volume: 5; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.15296/ijwhr.2017.13

2330-4456

Yagoob Garedaghi, Yaghoub Firozivand,

Travel-related health issues

The intracellular protozoan parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, causes infection in men and animals.The primary hosts which harbour the intestinal, sexual stage are cats (1,2).Transmission to humans happens mainly by eating raw or undercooked contaminated meat (3,4) , raw cow's milk and birds eggs, swallowing oocysts dis-charged in faeces of infected cats, inoculation of trophozoites through the skin, or by inhalation (5-7).Transmission from a mother infected during pregnancy, to the fetus causes congenital toxoplasmosis (8-10).Human toxoplasmosis is worldwide.In adolescence and adulthood, most infections are subclinical or run a very mild clinical course (11).Toxoplasmosis is a systemic infection, always accompanied by the production of serum anti-bodies at high titre.After the acute stage antibodies persist at lower titre, usually throughout life.The number of seropositive persons in a population, therefore, increases with age.Although antibodies for T. gondii have been found in the sera of humans and animals throughout the world, the proportion of subjects with positive reactions varies consider-ably by geographic area, age and test method used (11-13).The risk, by age, of acquiring infection is not uniform throughout the world.It has been reported that prevalence of seropositivity among Eskimos is zero, among Brazilians, 72% (14).Frequency among the population of the United States ranges from 10% to 20% in young adults and from 35% to 70% in older persons (11).Little is known about prevalence of T. gondii infection in Iran.The present study was undertaken to determine the prevalence of toxoplasmosis in pregnant women in Miandoab city, Iran for Toxoplasma IgG antibodies.Since very high IgG antibody levels may correlate with current infection, IgM testing may be used for differential diagnosis.Detection of IgM antibodies establishes the diagnosis of recently acquired or reactivated infection, but these antibodies soon disappear or decrease to very low levels followed by the appearance of IgG which stays longer.It was also planned to determine T. gondii IgM antibodies in pregnant women who were positive for toxoplasma IgG antibodies. Materials and MethodsThis cross-sectional study was performed from September to October 2014 in Miandoab city, north-west Iran.The city has a moderate and semi-humid climate.In the current survey, sample size was calculated considering a prevalence of 35%, a degree of precision of 4 (d = 0.04) and 95% CI.Consequently, the sample size was calculated as 200 pregnant women.