| Ocular Sequelae of Congenital Toxoplasmosis in Brazil Compared with Europe | |||||||||||||
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| Toxoplasma gondii is found throughout the world and is the most common parasitic infection in humans. Infection can cause inflammatory lesions at the back of the eye, which sometimes affect vision. These complications appear to be more common and more severe when people acquire infection in Brazil than in Europe or North America, but there have been no direct comparisons of patients identified and followed up in the same way. In this report, we compare children with congenital toxoplasmosis diagnosed at birth by universal screening in Europe and Brazil and followed up until the age of 4. We found that Brazilian children had a 5 times higher risk than European children of developing eye lesions and their lesions were larger, more numerous and more likely to affect the part of the area of the retina responsible for central vision. Two-thirds of Brazilian children infected with congenital toxoplasmosis had eye lesions by 4 years of age compared with 1 in 6 in Europe. These stark differences are likely to be due to the predominance of more virulent genotypes of the parasite in Brazil, which are rarely found in Europe. | |||||||||||||
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