Molecular epidemiology of HCV infection among acute and chronic liver disease patients in Kolkata, India

: The study revealed very high prevalence of HCV among acute and chronic hepatitis patients with predominance of genotype 3. Subtype 6b was commonly found in Thailand but not in India. The detection of this rare strain of Thai origin reveals the spread of HCV infection from Thailand to other parts of Asia. This observation necessitates further intensive surveillance of HCV infection in India to unravel the distribution of genotypes in the country and to correlate disease severity and treatment outcome to the genotype prevalence.