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Juliana Gil Melgaço [1] and Noemi Rovaris Gardinali [2] and Vinicius da Motta de Mello [1] and Mariana Leal [1] and Lia Laura Lewis-Ximenez [1] and Marcelo Alves Pinto [2]
Academic Editor: Antonio Rivero-Juarez
1, Ambulatório/Laboratório de Hepatites Virais, Instituto Oswaldo Cruz, Fundação Oswaldo Cruz, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil, fiocruz.br
2, Laboratório de Desenvolvimento Tecnológico em Virologia, Instituto Oswaldo Cruz, Fundação Oswaldo Cruz, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil, fiocruz.br
Received Sep 27, 2017; Revised Nov 28, 2017; Accepted Dec 13, 2017
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
1. History of Hepatitis E
After the development of serological tests for the detection of hepatitis A and hepatitis B viruses in the 1980s, a large waterborne outbreak which occurred in 1955-1956 in New Delhi, India, was investigated and classified as enteric non-A, non-B hepatitis [1]. Same epidemiological investigation was performed in Kashimir, India, during a non-A, non-B hepatitis outbreak in 1978-1979 [2]. To both outbreaks, the laboratorial tests confirmed that hepatitis E virus (HEV) was the etiology agent [3, 4]. It was the first time that HEV was identified and associated with waterborne epidemics [3, 4].
Years later, in 1983, HEV was first identified by electron microscopy when they replicated the infection with a pool of human feces in one volunteer who had previously contacted with hepatitis A virus. It was also the first time to detect genotype 1 [4, 5].
Other cases occurred in Costa Rica in 1975 [2, 6]. In 1988, an outbreak in Somalia, Africa, was reported reaching 11,000 people [7]. In Latin America, the first detection of HEV was described in Mexico, during an outbreak between 1986 and 1987, with detection of genotype 2 [5, 8]. The largest epidemic described was in China between 1986 and 1988, presenting 120,000 people with the disease caused by genotype 1 [9].
HEV genome was first cloned in the early 1990s, and genotypes 3 and 4 were identified in 1995 and 2003, respectively [4, 6, 7]. Other genotypes, such as 5, 6, and 7, have already been documented in animals, and these are considered reservoirs of the virus [10, 11].
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