HEV-Ag ELISA Kit

What is Hepatitis E virus?

While HEV infections, endemic and frequently epidemic occur mainly in developing

countries, it has also been observed in developed countries sporadically with or without a history of traveling to endemic area. Hepatitis E virus (HEV) is a non-enveloped, single-stranded RNA virus identified in 1990. There are four major genotypes of HEV, but there is only a single serotype. HEV is transmitted primarily through the fecal-oral route, transfusion and possibly maternal-fetal. Infection with HEV induces acute or sub-clinical liver diseases similar to Hepatitis A. However, recent studies revealed that persistent HEV infections do occur, especially in immune-suppressed cases, e.g. organ transplant recipients or HIV infected persons.

The overall case-fatality is 0.5~3%, and it is much higher (15~25%) among pregnant

women. Recently, it is reported that Hepatitis E cases with chronic liver disease reached a mortality rate of greater than 70%. A hypothesis that HEV infection is a zoonosis was presented in 1995. Subsequently, a swine HEV and later an avian HEV were identified and sequenced separately in 1997 and 2001, respectively. Since then, HEV infection include anti-HEV, viremia and feces excretion of HEV was observed in a wide variety of animals, i.e., swine, rodents, wild monkeys, deer, cow, goats, dogs, rodents and chicken in both developing and developed countries.