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Genetic diversity in hepatitis C virus in Egypt and possible association with hepatocellular carcinoma

¹ Viral Hepatitis Research Laboratory, National Hepatology and Tropical Medicine Research Institute, Cairo, Egypt
² International Health Division, Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine Department, University of Maryland-Baltimore, Baltimore, MD, USA
³ Department of Microbiology, Minia University, Egypt
⁴ National Liver Institute, Menoufia, Egypt
⁵ Department of Medical Microbiology, Malmö University Hospital, Lund University, Malmö, Sweden
⁶ National Cancer Institute, Cairo University, Cairo, Egypt
⁷ Department of Tropical Medicine, Cairo University, Cairo, Egypt
⁸ Lombardi Cancer Centre, Georgetown University, Washington DC, USA
⁹ Department of Virology, Immunology and Vaccinology, Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control, and Department of Microbiology, Tumor and Cell Biology, Karolinska Institutet, Solna, Sweden

Correspondence
Anders Widell
Anders.Widell{at}med.lu.se

Egypt has one of the world’s highest prevalences of hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection, with a majority of genotype 4 infections. To explore the genetic diversity of HCV in Egypt, sera from 131 Egyptians [56 from community studies, 37 chronic hepatitis patients, 28 hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients and 10 patients with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma] were genotyped by restriction fragment-length polymorphism and phylogenetic analyses of sequences from the mid-core and non-structural 5B regions. The different genotyping methods showed good agreement. The majority of the viruses (83 of 131; 63 %) were of subtype 4a, but five other subtypes within genotype 4 were also observed, as well as three genotype 1b, five genotype 1g and one genotype 3a samples. Interestingly, subtype 4o, which was easily identifiable in all three genomic regions, showed an association with HCC (P=0.017), which merits further investigation.

The GenBank/EMBL/DDBJ accession numbers for the sequences obtained in this study are AY548536–AY548737 and DQ911162–DQ911240.

Supplementary material is available in JGV Online.