Our study shows a significantly high prevalence of hepatitis virus infections in HIV infected patients. Hepatitis viruses in HIV may lead to faster progression to liver cirrhosis and a higher risk of antiretroviral therapy induced hepatotoxicity. Therefore, it would be advisable to detect hepatitis virus co-infections in these patients at the earliest.

IntroductionHepatitis B infection is one of the major public health problems globally and is the tenth leading cause of death. Worldwide, more than two billion of the population have evidence of past or recent HBV infection and there are more than 350 million chronic carriers of this infection [1]. In India, HBsAg prevalence among the general population ranges from 2 to 8%, which places India in an intermediate endemic zone for HBV [1,2].Occupational exposure of HBV is a well recognized risk for health care workers (HCWs). Throughout the world, millions of healthcare professionals work in health institutions and it is estimated that 600,000 to 800,000 cut and puncture injuries occur among them per year, of which approximately 50% are not registered [3]. According to WHO, the proportion of health-care workers in the general population varied substantially by region (0.2%-2.5%), as did the average number of injuries per health-care worker (0.2-4.7 sharps injuries per year). The annual proportion of health-care workers exposed to blood-borne pathogens was 5.9% for HBV, corresponding to about 66,000 HBV infections in health-care workers worldwide [4].In developing regions, 40%-65% of HBV infections in health-care workers occurred due to per-cutaneous occupational exposure. In contrast, the fraction of HBV was less than 10%, in developed regions, largely because of immunization and post-exposure prophylaxis [4]. Risk of HBV infection is primarily related to the degree of contact with blood in the workplace and also to the hepatitis B-e antigen (HBeAg) status of the source person. Studies have shown that of the HCWs who sustained injuries from needles contaminated with blood containing HBV, the risk of developing clinical hepatitis is variable from 1-6% if source is HBeAg negative to 22-31% if source is HBeAg positive [5,6]. Although most of the HBV infections in healthcare workers are attributed to per-cutaneous exposure, in many studies, most infected HCWs could not recall any overt per-cutaneous injury [7]. In addition, HBV has been demonstrated to survive in dried blood, at room temperature, on environmental surfaces, for at least one week. Thus, HBV infections that occur in HCWs with no history of exposure might have resulted from direct or indirect blood or body fluid exposures that inoculated HBV into the mucosal surfaces or cutaneous scratches and other lesions [5,6]. The potential for HBV transmission through contact with environmental surfaces has been demonstrated in investigations of HBV outbreaks among patients and staff of hemo-dialysis units [8,9].Blood contains the highest HBV titres of all body fluids and is the most important vehicle of transmission in the healthcare settings. HBsAg is also found in several other body fluids, including breast milk, bile, cerebrospinal fluid, feces, nasopharyngeal washings, saliva, semen, sweat, and synovial fluid. However, most body fluids are not efficient vehicles of transmission because they contain low quantities of infectious HBV, despite the presence of HBsAg [...

Character association and path analysis in twenty genotypically diverse indigenous genotypes of garlic (Allium sativum L.) were studied at the Central Institute of Temperate Horticulture, Srinagar during the years 2010 and 2011 for nine important characters. Total bulb yield showed positive and significant genotypic and phenotypic associations with plant height, number of leaves per plant, pseudo-stem length, bulb weight and number of cloves per bulb, indicating that selection based on these traits will help increasing the yield of garlic. Path coefficient analysis provides an effective means of a critical examination of specific force action to produce a given correlation and measure the relative importance of each factor. In this analysis bulb yield was taken as dependant variable and rest characters were considered as independent variable. Bulb weight showed high positive and direct effect and significant positive correlation with total bulb yield. Therefore, bulb with higher weight should be considered in selection criteria for increasing the total bulb yield and emphasis should be given for selecting the genotypes with higher bulb weight. Overall path analysis indicated that direct effect of bulb weight and equatorial bulb diameter and indirect effect of plant height, number of leaves per plant, pseudo stem length, polar bulb diameter, equatorial bulb diameter, number of cloves per bulb and average weight of 50 cloves should be considered simultaneously for amenability of total bulb yield. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3329/sja.v11i1.18374 SAARC J. Agri., 11(1): 45-52 (2013)

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