Highly endemic, waterborne toxoplasmosis in North Rio de Janeiro State, Brazil - Research

Emerging Infectious Diseases,  Jan, 2003  by Lilian Maria Garcia Bahia-Oliveira,  Jeffrey L. Jones,  Juliana Azevedo-Silva,  Cristiane C.F. Alves,  Fernando Orefice,  David G. Addiss

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Our study is subject to a number of limitations. Because seropositivity for T. gondii persists for many years a direct temporal relationship between behaviors and T. gondii infection cannot be established. However, our findings were confirmed in subset analyses of persons who may have been infected in the more recent past, i.e., children and persons with high serologic titers.

Our study and those of others recently published on congenital toxoplasmosis in Brazil (17,18) implicate toxoplasmosis as an important health problem. Toxoplasmosis may be equally important in many other developing countries, where the lack of adequate sanitary conditions expose populations to a variety of diseases. Although some waterborne infections have been more thoroughly evaluated by the public health system, others, such as toxoplasmosis, remain to be investigated further to fully define the risk attributable to waterborne transmission.