Hepatitis E virus seroprevalence and awareness about feco-oral transmission in blood donors at a single center in Puducherry.

Introduction: Asymptomatic hepatitis E virus (HEV) infections have been found in blood donors. Posttransfusion hepatitis E has been reported and raises concern due to cases of HEV-related mortality in patients with underlying cirrhosis or immunocompromised patients. This study aimed to determine the seroprevalence of HEV-associated sociodemographic parameters, awareness about feco-oral transmitted diseases among healthy blood donors attending a tertiary care teaching hospital blood center.

Materials and methods: This was a cross-sectional study done for 1 year from January 2019 to January 2020. Our study included a sample size of 920 blood donors attending for donation at a single center. All the samples were tested using HEV IgM kit with the antigen used for coating were four synthetic peptides with conservative epitopes of ORF2 and ORF3 in genotypes 1, 2, 3, and 4. An open-ended questionnaire regarding awareness of the feco-oral transmission of diseases was administered; data regarding clinical, epidemiological, and demographic characteristics were collected from the donors by a structured data collection proforma. The responses were recorded.

Results: Our study results showed a seroprevalence of 1.41%. All the reactive donors were asymptomatic during our routine screening procedures. Most of the donors (457 donors), i.e., 49.7%, belonged to the lower middle class; the mean age of the study population was 28.6 years (standard deviation 8.9).

Conclusion: This study reflects the burden of HEV in the local population, and this result can be considered a preliminary step in quantifying the risk of transfusion-transmitted HEV. Cost-effectiveness in implementing HEV screening as a part of routine TTI screening to be considered.