The risk of hepatitis B transmission from staff to patients in hemodialysis units–-an overrated problem?

✍ Scribed by Douglas R. LaBrecque; Arun K. Dhand

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1981
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 333 KB
• Volume: 1
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0270-9139
• DOI: 10.1002/hep.1840010505

✦ Synopsis

The staff and patients in hemodialysis units have the greatest hospital risk of acquiring hepatitis B (HB) infection. We followed the patients of two dialysis nurses in two different dialysis units. One nurse dialyzed 19 patients a total of 50 times during the prodrome of acute HB. The second nurse was a known, asymptomatic carrier of HBsAg who was also HBeAg( +) and anti-HBc( +). Over a 2year period, she dialyzed 30 patients a total of 142 times. Neither group of patients showed evidence of having acquired HB, suggesting that the risk of HB transmission from staff to patient is low even in the high-risk setting of a dialysis unit and a presumably highly infectious HBeAg(+) chronic carrier. In our study, the risk in this latter setting was less than 0.0040 (binomial probability p < 0.05). The data do not support restricting care of patients by health workers who are chronic carriers of the virus.