Prevalence of hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) in Viqarunnessa noon girls' school children in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Screening of serum samples from 836 apparently healthy school girls with sound socioeconomical background from Viqarunnessa Noon Girls' School in Dhaka, was done for hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) by Latex quick test and all Latex quick test positive samples were rechecked by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. Thus the prevalence of HBsAg among healthy female school age children was 2.3% by the former method and 0.8% by the latter. Hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection is more common in Bangladesh but HBsAg prevalence rate in normal school age children of the present study was much lower than reported from many other parts of the world. The reason of this fact presumably was that in this study serum specimens were collected from apparently healthy female children belonging to high socioeconomic status in Bangladesh. Further studies are appreciated to determine the prevalence of HBsAg among healthy low socioeconomic school age children and to investigate HBsAg subtypes and possible main mode of transmission of HBV in Bangladeshi population.