Strategy for hepatitis C virus genotyping in epidemiological studies

The level at which the hepatitis C virus (HCV) needs to be characterized in epidemics, largely depends on the magnitude of the epidemics. It is obviou s that different molecular biological tools need to be used to analyze HCV variability in, for example, nosocomial outbreaks as compared with regional epidemics in Central Africa. Successful epidemiological studies therefore rely both on the knowledge of virus variability and the diversity of the av ailable molecular tools. This manuscript attempts to shed some light on bot h parameters and tries to establish some algorithms or backgrounds for epid emiological studies.