Article Information

Authors:
Anastasia N. Trataris1,2
Lorraine Arntzen1
Jennifer Rossouw1
John Frean1,2
Allan Karstaedt3

Affiliations:
1National Institute for Communicable Diseases, National Health Laboratory Service, South Africa

2University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa

3Chris Hani Baragwanth Hospital, Bertsham, South Africa

Correspondence to:
Anastasia Trataris

Postal address:
Centre for Emergingand Zoonotic Diseases Special Bacterial Pathogens Reference Laboratory

How to cite this poster:
 Trataris, A.N., Arntzen, L., Rossouw, J., Frean, J. & Karstaedt, A., 2012, ‘Bartonella henselae and Bartonella quintana seroprevalence in HIV-positive, HIV-negative and clinically healthy volunteers in Gauteng, South Africa’, Onderstepoort Journal of Veterinary Research79(2), Art. #479, 1 page. http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/
ojvr.v79i2.479

Note:
Proceedings of the Conference of the Southern African Centre for Infectious Disease Surveillance ‘One Health’ held at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases, Johannesburg, July 2011.

Copyright Notice:
© 2012. The Authors. Licensee: AOSIS OpenJournals.

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Bartonella henselae and Bartonella quintana seroprevalence in HIV-positive, HIV-negative and clinically healthy volunteers in Gauteng, South Africa
In This Poster...
Open Access
Bartonella is a genus of opportunistic, Gram-negative bacilli transmitted from animals to human hosts. Bartonellae are newly emerging pathogens that can cause a variety of clinical manifestations in both immunocompromised and healthy persons.

The aims were to determine the IgG and IgM seroprevalences of Bartonella henselae and Bartonella quintana in immunocompromised and immunocompetent individuals using an immunofluorescence assay (IFA).

A total of 382 HIV-positive outpatients of the Chris Hani Baragwanth HIV-clinic, 382 retrospective residual samples from HIV-negative antenatal patients, and 42 clinically healthy volunteers were tested using a commercially available IFA kit to determine the prevalence of IgG and IgM antibodies to B. henselae and B. quintana.

The IgM and IgG seroprevalences for the HIV-positive patients were 14% (53/382) and 32% (121/382), respectively, compared to 18% for both IgM (62/342) and IgG (63/342) in the HIV-negative antenatal patients. Similarly, the prevalence for IgM was 17% (7/42) and IgG was 19% (8/42) for the clinically healthy volunteers.

HIV-positivity appears to be a significant risk factor for Bartonella infection, compared with healthy subjects. Although IFAs have a high sensitivity for Bartonella antibody detection, they have various limitations including cross-reactivity with other closely-related human pathogens.