Syphilis reactivity among blood donors in Brazil: associated factors and implications for public health monitoring

作者：Natalia A. Braga, Sheila de Oliveira Garcia Mateos, Renata Buccheri, Vivian Iida Avelino‐Silva, Donald E. Warden, Cesar de Almeida‐Neto, Maísa Aparecida Ribeiro, Luiz Amorim, Paula Loureiro, Nelson Abrahim Fraiji, Márcio K. Oikawa, Eduard Grebe, Mars Stone, Éster Cerdeira Sabino, Brian Custer, for the NHLBI Recipient Epidemiology and Donor Evaluation Study-IV-Pediatric (REDS-IV-P) · 发表于：BMC Public Health · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.1186/s12889-024-21114-3 · 被引用次数：6 · 研究领域：Syphilis Diagnosis and Treatment、Reproductive tract infections research、Blood groups and transfusion

Increasing syphilis infection rates are a concerning issue worldwide. Blood donation screening is an opportunity to monitor the burden of asymptomatic infections, providing information on contemporary factors associated with infection and public health insights into transmission. Blood donations collected at five Brazilian blood centers between January 2020 and February 2022 were screened with treponemal or non-treponemal assays according to local protocols, followed by alternate Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay (ELISA); samples with reactive or indeterminate results in the alternate ELISA were further tested with the rapid plasma reagin (RPR), and categorized as RPR-positive or RPR-negative. RPR-positive donations were also grouped according to RPR titers (< 1:8 or ≥ 1:8). We report the prevalence of syphilis in first-time donors (FTD) and repeat donors (RD), as well as incidence in RD. Multivariable models were used to assess factors associated with RPR-positive syphilis. Additionally, we explored the relationship between syphilis positivity in FTD and syphilis cases registered by the Brazilian public health surveillance system from 2012 to 2022. Of 862,146 donations, 10,771 (1.3%) were reactive or indeterminate on screening; 7,541 available samples underwent additional testing. Of those, 5,876 (77.9%) tested positive or indeterminate on the alternate ELISA; 907 (12.0%) were RPR-negative, 2,980 (39.5%) were RPR-positive < 1:8, and 1,989 (26.4%) were RPR-positive with titer...