Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. Corresponding author. Phone: 33 4 91 25 41 Fax: 33 4 91 79 20 E-mail address: philippe. Hepatitis C virus HCV was transmitted from a chronic carrier to his female partner during unprotected anal and vaginal intercourse. Based on HVR1 and phylogenetic tree analysis, the couple had closely related isolates.
These findings confirm sexual transmission of HCV without other risk factors. Other causes of acute viral hepatitis were excluded, the autoantibody screening result was negative, and the patient tested negative for human immunodeficiency virus HIV infection.
Over the 6 months before her illness, she had only one active physical relationship, which included oral sex and vaginal and anal intercourse with her partner. She was negative for HCV infection during this period. Her partner, a year-old man, had had an episode of jaundice with an increase in transaminase activity in after a blood transfusion. In , he was positive for HCV and his liver biopsy showed, chronic active hepatitis. The temporal relationship between HCV positivity and sexual intercourse led us to suspect a sexually transmitted infection.
In this study, we investigated by HVR1 sequence analysis a case of transmission of an HCV isolate from a chronic carrier to his female partner during unprotected anal and vaginal intercourse. HCV is transmitted mainly through direct percutaneous exposure to infected blood. Perinatal transmission is possible, although the risk is low. The role of sexual transmission in the spread of HCV infection is still debated, but many studies have demonstrated it 12 , Such transmission is rare; it probably results from common risk factors or sharing toilet instruments and follows a parenteral route rather than occurring via sexual intercourse, which plays a minor role except in sexually transmitted disease with genital lesions 1 , 3 , 5 , 10 , HCV isolates show four levels of genetic variability: types, subtypes, isolates, and quasispecies QS.
This heterogeneity is a consequence of high error rates in RNA replication. HCV circulates as a heterogeneous population of genetically different but closely related genomes, the QS The HVR1 region of the genome is highly variable among and within patients and can be used to identify individual HCV isolates, which is of particular interest for epidemiological studies 9. In order to find out if the virus had been transmitted between the two patients, we performed sequence analysis of part of the HVR1 region of the genome of virus isolated from these two patients.
