Seroprevalence of Blood Borne Pathogens among Health Care Workers and Their Hepatitis B Vaccination Status in Tertiary Care Hospitals in India
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND & AIM: Occupational exposure to blood-borne pathogens, mainly human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), hepatitis B (HBV) and hepatitis C (HCV), poses a serious risk to healthcare workers (HCWs), especially in developing countries, due to the high prevalence of these pathogens and fewer safety precautions. The aim of this study was to investigate the seroprevalence of HBV, HCV, and HIV infections and to measure the vaccination practices in HCWs at three tertiary care hospitals in Delhi, India. METHOD: In a descriptive (cross-sectional) study, the HCWs of three tertiary hospitals were selected by simple random sampling and divided into four different groups (nurses, laboratory and operational theater technicians, doctors and housekeeping workers). The participants were screened for the presence of hepatitis B surface antigen (HBs Ag), antibody to hepatitis B surface antigen (anti HBs), antibody to hepatitis C (anti HCV), and antibody to HIV (anti HIV). From June 2010 to April 2012, a structured questionnaire was administered to 850 HCWs after obtaining consent. RESULTS: Among 850 HCWs, 51.8% were nurses and 50.6% were female with a mean (SD) age of 34(8.7) years. The overall seroprevalence of HBsAg, anti-HCV, and anti-HIV was 1.1%, 0.3%, and 0.1%, respectively. There was a high proportion of HBsAg positivity among housekeeping workers (4.9%) followed by nurses (3.3%). Out of 9 positive cases of HBsAg, 66% (6) were never vaccinated and out of a total of 11 positive subjects, 72 % (8) had previous exposure in the workplace. Complete HBV vaccination was done in 78.2% (605) of the HCWs and 11.3% (75) were partially vaccinated. Only 20.1% had checked their anti-HBs. Protective (>10 IU/mL) anti-HBs was seen in 70.6% (600) of the participants, indicating that nearly one third of HCWs were not protected against HBV infection. The majority of the study subjects (63.6%) believed that they were immunized against hepatitis B and did not need to check the immunity titer. CONCLUSION: Not all HCWs were vaccinated and the majority of vaccinated subjects did not know their immunity level. Housekeeping workers had a high seropositivity rate of infections and a low rate of vaccination against HBV. Institutional policy and training were found to be of paramount importance to improve the quality of health in HCWs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".