Hepatitis A virus HAV infection has disproportionately affected more men who have sex with men MSM , occurring in outbreaks, despite being vaccine-preventable. Sociodemographic and clinical information were collected. Blood samples were collected for screening of sexually transmitted infections STIs and serum samples were tested for IgM and total anti-HAV antibodies.
Non-reactive results for total anti-HAV antibodies were found in of Identifying clinical correlates of HAV susceptibility in key populations is a fundamental step towards development of public policy focused on prevention, especially following the recent hepatitis A outbreak in Brazil. 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 author and source are credited.
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Hepatitis A is an acute liver infection caused by hepatitis A virus HAV , a nonenveloped RNA virus, and humans are the only known natural reservoir [ 1 ]. HAV is highly contagious and its transmission is faecal-oral via consumption of contaminated food or water or through direct person-to-person contact, including sexual contact [ 1 ].
In , there were an estimated HAV infection has traditionally been considered an early childhood disease, but the epidemiology of infection has changed over time in many regions of the world, because of routine childhood vaccination and the improvement of socioeconomic conditions, resulting in a shift in the susceptible population to HAV toward adolescents and mostly adults [ 3 , 4 ].
Since there has been a reduction in the incidence of infection in children under 10 years of age while the number of adolescents and adults with hepatitis A has increased, age groups where the disease tends to be symptomatic and may be more severe [ 6 ]. Over the past three decades, outbreaks occurred among MSM communities across the world [ 8 β 12 ].
