Sir.—The July 1992 issue of AJDC contained an article by Niu et al1 regarding prevention of perinatal transmission of the hepatitis B virus without any control from the study population. Therefore, I would like to discuss preliminary results of our study performed with some controls.
Two thousand six hundred sixty-seven healthy pregnant women admitted to Hacettepe University Maternity Hospital for delivery, who did not have history of hepatitis at least within the past 2 years, tested positive for hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg). An enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay method (Auszym monoclonal, Abbott Laboratories, North Chicago, Ill) was used to measure the antigen. Student's t test was used for statistical evaluation of results.
Ninety-seven (3.64%) of these women were HBsAg-positive at delivery. This figure was very similar to that of healthy female blood donors (3.23%; P<.05) at this hospital, which is markedly lower than for male blood donors (4.99%;