Low prevalence of HCV, HIV, and HTLV-I/II infection markers in northwestern Greece: results of a 3-year prospective donor study (1995–1997)

Molecular epidemiology of hepatitis C virus (HCV) in Greece: temporal trends in HCV genotype‐specific incidence and molecular characterization of genotype 4 isolates

“…Greece belongs to the intermediate endemicity countries for hepatitis C with a wide variance of seropositivity along different regions and various populations. Prevalence rates of HCV infection in the general population of Greece have been found to range in the various regions of the country from 0.5% to 10.9% [36][37][38], whereas anti-HCV positivity is detected in 0.6% of the volunteer blood donor population [36,[39][40][41]. There are also available epidemiological data concerning the prevalence of hepatitis C in specific groups of the general population, such as school children (0%), healthy company employees (0.51%), army recruit (0.4%), or in high risk groups, such as imprisoned IDUs (80.6%), female and transsexual prostitutes (4.3%), Albanian refugees (0.6%), inhabitants of endemic areas (10.9%), and multiply transfused subjects/haemophiliacs (44.3%) [33,38,[41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49].…”

Recommendations on hepatitis C screening for adults

“…The proportion of confirmed active infections among positive screening test results varies widely across studies and test types. The proportion of RNA-positive, active HCV infection cases ranged from 0% to 89.7% among positive antibody-based assays [29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][45][46][47][48][51][52][53][54] and from 0% to 100% among antigen-based assays. 39,44,49,50 Only three studies conducted confirmatory polymerase chain reaction on samples that tested negative for HCV antibody or antigen.…”

HCV-RNA qualitative assay based on transcription mediated amplification improves the detection of hepatitis C virus infection in patients on hemodialysis: Results from five hemodialysis units in central Greece

“…Antibodies against hepatitis E virus (Genelabs Diagnostics, Singapore Science Park, Singapore) and anti-human T-cell lymphotropic virus type I/II antibodies (Murex Diagnostics, Dartford, UK, and Abbott Laboratories, Abbott Park, IL, USA and HTLV Blot 2.4, Genelab Diagnostics, Singapore) were determined as reported previously (Dalekos et al, 1995(Dalekos et al, , 1998bStefanidis et al, 2004;Zervou et al, 2003Zervou et al, , 2004.…”