Prevalence of Congenital Toxoplasmosis in Pregnant Women with Complicated Pregnancy Outcomes in Assiut Governorate, Egypt

Abstract

T he protozoan T. gondii is an obligate intracellular par- asite that infects humans and a broad spectrum of vertebrate hosts (Skariah et al., 2010). It causes toxoplasmosis which is one of the most common parasitic infections in humans and is most typically asymptomatic. However, primary infection in a pregnant woman can cause severe and disabling disease in the developing fetus including abortion (Gebremedhin et al., 2013), fetal death, or neurological or ocular damage of the fetus (Tenter et al., 2000).The severity of clinical disease in congenitally infected infants is related inversely to the gestational age at the time of primary maternal infection (Robbins et al., 2012; McAuley, 2014).