Thalassemia is a congenital hemolytic disease caused by defective globin synthesis treated by blood transfusion. Transfusion-transmitted infections still make a great challenge in the management of patients with thalassemia major. The most important worldwide transfusion-transmitted infections are hepatitis B virus (HBV), hepatitis C virus (HCV) and HIV. The objective of this study is to update the prevalence of the three major transfusion-transmitted infections HCV, HBV and HIV among thalassemic patients followed up in the Hematology Department, Children Hospital, Cairo University. The study included 174 multitransfused thalassemic patients (162 major and 12 intermedia), registered at the Pediatric Hematology Clinic, Cairo University. Their age ranged from 2 to 27 years with a mean of 11.26 ± 5.4 years. Patients were subjected to full history taking, stressing on history of blood transfusions (onset, frequency and duration) at a single or multiple centers and abdominal examination. Laboratory investigations including complete blood count, aminotransferases (aspartate aminotransferase and alanine aminotransferase), ferritin and viral markers of HBV surface antigen (HBsAg), HCV antibodies (anti-HCV) and anti-HIV were assayed for all cases by a third-generation ELISA method. HCV PCR was performed for 75 cases. Of the 174 patients, none of them were HBsAg and anti-HIV positive. However, 90 patients were anti-HCV positive (51.7%). HCV PCR was positive in 56 patients (74.3%) of the 75 with positive antibody tested. HCV antibody positivity is statistically significant with age of the patient, serum ferritin and liver transaminases (P < 0.01). HCV-RNA by PCR positivity was significantly related to patients' age and serum ferritin (P < 0.05). Serum ferritin showed statistically significant positive correlation with liver transaminases. Despite the decrease in prevalence of HCV antibody in our patients from 71% in 1995 to 51.7% in our study, yet HCV infection still represents a major health problem for our thalassemic patients, which requires more attention and efforts to challenge. There is a dramatic decrease in the prevalence of HBV infection over the last decade, thanks to mass compulsory vaccination and blood screening. HIV infection does not represent a problem owing to very low population prevalence.

Background:The Eight-item Fear Scale is a unidimensional scale evaluating the perceived feelings of fear associated with the thought of the coronavirus.

It is important to give a good consideration towards the establishment of effective breeding programs for pumpkin purification and improvement. This study was carried out during three successive summer seasons of 2013 till 2015 to determine the effectiveness and efficiency of one cycle of simple recurrent selection and selfing with selection for two generations, as two breeding methods, to improve some important characters of pumpkin cultivar 'Balady'. Eight derived genetic populations; i. e, original population (C0), one cycle of simple recurrent selection (C1) and six selected progenies from selfing with selection for two generations (S2-1, S2-2, S2-3, S2-4, S2-5 and S2-6) were evaluated for vegetative, flowering, yield components and fruit quality characters. The results of the estimated values of coefficient of variation indicated that the original population (C0) had an extensive range of variability which ranged from 13.55% for number of days to first female flower up to 71.83% for total yield/plant. The first cycle of recurrent selection enhanced the main stem length, number of branches/plant, average fruit weight and number of fruits/plant with about 122.60%, 157.50%, 338.30 % and 243.33% respectively. Also, selfing with selection method for two generations enhanced main stem length within the range of 17.00% to 132.10 %, and number of branches per plant by 7.20% to 71.60%, average fruit weight was noticed to be within the range of 65.10% to 285.46% and number of fruits/plant was within the range of 4.00% to 191.66 % for all selected selfed progenies over that of the original population. The selected selfed progeny S2-1 and C1 gave high improvement values of total yield/plant with about 189.91% and 148.69%, respectively. The first cycle of recurrent selection was found to be apparently efficient in increasing and enhancing the general performances more than selfing with selection for two generations for most studied characters, except for number of days to first female flower and carotene content. Therefore, it may be concluded that recurrent selection seemed to be effective and efficient for developing of improved commercial pumpkin cultivar 'Balady'; whereas, selfing with selection can be successfully used to develop inbred lines for the production of hybrid or synthetic cultivar, out of the common commercial ones.

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