Article Information Authors: K. Kistiah1,2 John Frean1,2 J. Winiecka-Krusnell3 A. Barragan3 Affiliations: 1Parasitology Reference Unit, National Institute for Communicable Diseases, South Africa 2University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa 3Department of Parasitology, Mycology and Environmental Microbiology, Swedish Institute for Infectious Diseases, Sweden Correspondence to: John Frean Postal address: Private Bag X4, Sandringham 2131, South Africa How to cite this poster: Kistiah, K., Frean, J., Winiecka-Krusnell, J. & Barragan, A., 2012, ‘Unexpectedly low seroprevalence of toxoplasmosis in South Africa’, Onderstepoort Journal of Veterinary Research 79(2), Art. #486, 1 page. http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/ ojvr.v79i2.486 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.

Unexpectedly low seroprevalence of toxoplasmosis in South Africa In This Poster... Open Access Toxoplasmosis is an infection of warm-blooded vertebrates caused by the obligate intracellular protozoan parasite, Toxoplasma gondii. It is one of the most common parasitic diseases of humans, infecting approximately one-third of the world’s population. In persons with advanced HIV, toxoplasmosis represents a major opportunistic infection of the central nervous system. Approximately two-thirds of all people living with HIV live in sub-Saharan Africa. In areas such as this, toxoplasmosis could theoretically pose a huge threat. There is little known about T. gondii prevalence in humans in Africa. Geographically, prevalences vary widely on this continent, as observed in other parts of the world. There is limited historical information about the disease in South Africa. More knowledge is needed at a regional level about the risk of toxoplasmosis, diagnostic issues, and measures to reduce the risk to susceptible persons. The seroprevalence of T. gondii in selected populations, namely HIV-positive and HIV-negative individuals, and a more general sample biased towards pregnant women, was therefore investigated and found to be 9.8% (37/376), 12.8% (48/376) and 6.4% (32/497) respectively. Compared with historical data from South Africa, the prevalence has decreased substantially; however, the incidence of clinical disease is unknown, despite the very high burden of HIV and AIDS cases (5.9 million and 0.7 million, respectively in 2009). This study provided information relating to the diagnosis and current seroprevalence of T. gondii in South Africa. Many questions still remain to be answered however, to fully understand the impact of this parasite on the country’s population.