%0 Journal Article
%T Incidence of maternal Toxoplasma infections in pregnancy in Upper Austria, 2000-2007
%A Ulrich Sagel
%A Alexander Kr£żmer
%A Rafael T Mikolajczyk
%J BMC Infectious Diseases
%D 2011
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1471-2334-11-348
%X Screening tests for 63,416 women and over 90,000 pregnancies (more than 84.5% of pregnancies in the studied region) in the time period between 01.01.2000 and 31.12.2007 were analysed. The incidence of toxoplasmosis was estimated indirectly by binomial and directly by interval censored regression.During the studied period, 66 acute infections (risk of 0.07% per pregnancy) were detected, but only 29.8% of seronegative women were tested at least three times during their pregnancies. The seroprevalence of Toxoplasma antibodies among all tested women was 31%. Indirectly estimated incidence (from differences in prevalence by age) was 0.5% per pregnancy, while directly estimated incidence (interval censored regression) was 0.17% per pregnancy (95% confidence interval: 0.13-0.21%).Calculating incidence from observed infections results in severe underreporting due to many missed tests and potential diagnostic problems. Using statistical modelling, we estimated primary toxoplasmosis to occur in 0.17% (0.13-0.21%) of all pregnancies in Upper Austria.Congenital toxoplasmosis is among the infections associated with a high risk of complications, but fortunately acute infections during pregnancy are relatively rare [1,2]. Due to the potential to cause life-long disability, the burden of disease of congenital toxoplasmosis is considerable [3]. In order to prevent foetal infections and complications of toxoplasmosis, screening programs during pregnancy and a subsequent treatment of identified maternal primoinfections were introduced in a few countries [1,2,4-6].Austria was the first country to start with population-wide free screening and treatment of maternal infections in 1975, soon followed by France. Nonetheless, little is known about the incidence of these infections from these countries despite of their long tradition of toxoplasmosis prevention [7]. We used data from a screening laboratory that covers most of the population of one federal state in Austria in an attempt to det
%U http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2334/11/348