Recent Trends of Seroprevalence of Syphilis in Apparently Healthy Population in a Tertiary Care Centre
Kiran Bala, Uma Chaudhary, Neeraj Arora, and Seema Mittal
Department of Microbiology, Pt B D Sharma, PGIMS, Rohtak, Haryana, India.
Abstract—Syphilis is a sexually transmitted disease (STD), caused by Spirochete Treponema pallidum . It is an obligatory parasite of human beings .There are no known animal or environmental reservoirs. It is an old re-emerging disease in most part of world is currently a big challenge to clinicians. Early diagnosis and treatment of syphilis is extremely important to decrease further transmission and long term morbidity associated with syphilis. The Venereal Disease Research Laboratory (VDRL) test is one of the most widely used simple and rapid test to determine the seroprevalence of syphilis in community. We are working in a tertiary care hospital having a heavy load of serum samples of patients from different clinical departments. This study was done from 1 st January 2006 to 31 st December 2010. We tested 86,126 serum samples received from different clinical departments for VDRL testing. Out of these, 1,559 (1.83%) serum samples were VDRL reactive.
Index Terms—Syphilis, Treponema pallidum , VDRL, Seroprevalence
Cite: Kiran Bala, Uma Chaudhary, Neeraj Arora, and Seema Mittal, "Recent Trends of Seroprevalence of Syphilis in Apparently Healthy Population in a Tertiary Care Centre," International Journal of Pharma Medicine and Biological Sciences, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 66-73, October 2012.