The Prevalence of HBsAg, Anti HCV and Anti HIV Before Upper Gastrointestinal Endoscopy

With widespread use of endoscopic gastrointestinal procedures, contagious spread of infectious agents became a major concern and national and international guidelines were published. There is still debate weather current disinfections methods are adequate to prevent endoscopic transmission of hepatitis B and C viruses and weather routine preprocedure testing for hepatitis B and C serologies is advisable or not. Hepatitis B infection is still a major health problem. It is estimated that there are 3 million people infected with hepatitis B virus in Turkey and 450 million worldwide. Hepatitis B and C infections cause important morbidity and mortality via acute infection, chronic infection, cirrhosis and hepatocellular cancer (1). The reported prevalence of hepatitis C changes from 0.1% to 5% in different countries and the global prevalence reported by World Health Organization is 3% (2). The prevalence in Turkey ranges from 1% to 2.4% in different studies. Hepatitis C prevalence widely changes in different patient populations from 0.5% to 51.6% with highest prevalence among hemodialysis patients (3,4). In a study conducted in Konya, Turkey, 17071 blood donors between 2003-2009 were retrospectively analyzed and ABSTRACT OZET