Prevalence of Hepatitis C in General Population of District Swat, Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa, Pakistan

The present study was conducted on the prevalence of Hepatitis C in the general population of District Swat, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, Pakistan from January 2017 to October 2017. A total of about 1415 individuals were examined, among which 74 (5.22%) were found positive against HCV antibody test. Of the 1415 examined individuals, 759 (53.6%) were males and 656 (46.4%) were females. Among the 74 (5.22%) infected individuals, 32 were females and 42 were males. A maximum number of individuals who were HCV antibody positive belongs to the age group the between 36 to 55 years (21 and 17 i.e. 7% and 6.9%). samples found positive for antibody and antigen-based test, were further investigated for the presence of Hepatitis C related RNA with PCR and the results show that only 32 (2.3%) individuals have Hepatitis C viral RNA. This is about (43.24%) of the total HCV antibody positive individuals. Out of 32 HCV-PCR positive samples, 11 (34.4%) were symptomatic and 21 (65.6%) were asymptomatic. Further analysis of the PCR positive samples shows that 20 (62.5%) were females and 12 (37.7%) were male. Among the HCV positive samples, genotype 3a was the most abundant 18 (56.2%) of the infected individuals followed by genotype 3b in 4 female (20%) and 3 male (25%), genotype 2a in 3 females (15%) and 2 male (16.6%), and 1b in 1 (5%) females and 1 (8.3%) male. No unknown RNA sequences were found in the studied samples.