N. Langeland et al., PREVALENCE OF HSV-2 ANTIBODIES AMONG STD CLINIC PATIENTS IN TANZANIA, International journal of STD & AIDS, 9(2), 1998, pp. 104-107
Patients attending a referral sexually transmissible diseases clinic a
t Muhimbili Medical Centre in Dar-es-Salaam during the period 1989 to
1993 were examined for herpes simplex virus type 2 (HSV-2) antibodies.
An ELISA technique, using glycoprotein G of HSV-2 as antigen, was use
d to test 294 patients' sera. Of these, 126 sera were HSV-2 positive,
while 168 were negative, yielding an overall HSV-2 prevalence of 42.9%
. Sixty-three per cent of the women and 35.5% of the men were HSV-2 po
sitive. Seropositivity rose from 8.7% in the youngest men to 61.5% in
the oldest male age group, while even the youngest women aged 20 or le
ss had an HSV-2 prevalence of 55.6%. There was a significant positive
association between HIV and HSV-2 seropositivity (P=0.0006), most pron
ounced among the youngest women. There was no over-representation of H
SV-2 positivity among patients with genital ulcer disease, indicating
that other causes of this disease could be more common than HSV-2 in T
anzania.