Hepatitis C Virus Seroprevalence among Blood Donors in a Tertiary Hospital in Manipur

Blood transfusion is an integral part of patient management in medical and surgical practices. But it is also an ideal mode of transmission of blood-borne infections to the recipients. Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is one of the transfusion transmissible infections, which is a major cause of morbidity and mortality wordwide. The infection rarely produces symptoms until the patient is complicated with cirrhosis and liver cancer. The aim of this study was to analyse the seroreactivity of HCV antibody among blood donors and to assess the level of blood safety in a three year period from January 2010 to December 2012. The study was conducted at the department of Immunohaematology and Blood Transfusion, Regional Institute of Medical Sciences, Manipur, a tertiary care centre in the North-Eastern India. A total of 39,395 blood units collected from 19931(50.59%) voluntary blood donors(VBD) and 19464(49.41%) replacement/relative blood donors(RBD) were tested for the mandatory transfusion transmissible infection markers by NACO approved ELISA / Rapid kits.The total seroreactivity of HCV antibody was 1.52%, out of which 0.40% belonged to VBD and 1.11% belonged to RBD. The lower rate of seroreactivity in VBD reflects to encourage and motivate voluntary blood donation. The introduction of more advanced Nucleic acid testing (NAT) in the screening will contribute to blood safety with more sensitivity and specificity.