Studies on the Immunological Relationship between Viral Hepatitis and Toxoplasma gondii Infections in man and animals

Abstract

Toxoplasma gondii, has been incriminated as one ofthe etiologic agents in many obstetric disorders. One of these disorders is habitual abortion in women .In order to establish the relationship between cats, which is considered the only definitive host of this protozoan, and women,25 samples of cat's faeces were examined for the presence of oocysts, which were detected in 28% of the samples. In the same time pregnant women, whether in contact with cats or non-contacts were also examined for the presence of Toxoplasma gondii antibodies in their sera by IHA test. The prevalence of Toxoplasma gondii antibodies among contact women with cats was 81.1% while in those without contact was 17.8 %. This result shows the role cats can play in the transmission of toxoplasmosis to pregnant women. The main aim of this work was to correlate between Toxoplasma gondii infection and viral hepatitis infection in pregnant women. For this purpose 110 Rh-positive pregnant women were chosen from Girga hospital and divided into 4 groups. The first second and third, each was composed of 30 women, with history of abortion of I, 2nd or 3" abortion respectively; the fourth group included 20 women with no history of abortion The sera of all the groups were examined for the presence of antibodies of Toxoplasma gondii as mentioned above as well as HBs Ag. ( using the latex agglutination test ), HCV antibodies ( using the immunocombe II test) and HEY antibodies (using ELISA test) .