Prevalence and partial sequence analysis of human T cell lymphotropic virus type I in China

Abstract

A total of 145,293 serum samples were collected from volunteer blood donors in 13 provinces of China and tested for anti-HTLV antibody using an ELISA licensed in China. Thirty were positive for anti-HTLV by ELISA and 19 of those 30 samples were confirmed positive using a supplemental immunoblot assay. Anti-HTLV-I was detected only in samples from Fujian province (a Southern province) where the positivity rate was approximately 0.05%. The region encoding gp46 from 5 of the 19 antibody positive samples was amplified and sequenced. Sequence analysis indicated that these isolates belong to HTLV-I genotype A. These data suggest that HTLV-I is not endemic throughout China and the virus may be restricted to a particular region.