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A Short Note On Hepatitis E Virus ( Hev ) Essay

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Introduction Hepatitis E Virus (HEV) was first recognized in 1983 as a spherical viral particle of 27-30 nm from stool of the infected volunteer suspected with non A non B hepatitis (Balayan et al., 1983). HEV infection may lead to acute hepatic failure especially in pregnant women and chronic liver patients. It causes chronic hepatitis and cirrhosis in immunocompromised patients (Kamar et al., 2008). It is endemic in many Asian and African countries where the prevalence of HEV IgG antibody is upto 50% (Taniguchi et al., 2009). In recent years, the number of cases of HEV infection has increased in Europe although it is a non endemic area (Dalton et al., 2008; Lewis, Wichmann and Duizer, 2010; (Pischke et al., 2011). HEV infection is responsible for about 3 million symptomatic acute hepatitis E annually which causes nearly 70,000 death all over the World (Rein et al., 2012). HEV belongs to genus Hepevirus and family hepeviridae (Acha et al., 2003; International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses, 2011). HEV differs from hepatitis viruses A, B, C and D both genetically and structurally (Kumar, Das and Jameel, 2010). There are 5 genotypes of HEV. The genotype 1 and 2 viruses are found only in humans, genotype 3 and 4 viruses are found in both human and animals whereas

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