Serological and Molecular Detection of Toxoplasma Gondii among Pregnant Women Giving Birth at the University Of Gondar Specialized Hospital in Gondar Town, Northwest Ethiopia

Objective: Congenital toxoplasmosis can be presented when immunosuppressed women are reactivating of this infection acquired before pregnancy in addition to women recently exposed to this disease during pregnancy, which causes of fetal death, neonatal death or congenital defects.Women mainly get this infection by ingested improperly cooked or raw meat consisting of viable tissue cysts or by contaminated foods and water within sporulated oocysts or through the placenta.Thus, this study aimed to detect Toxoplasma gondii in pregnant women using serologically and molecularly at study area.Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted from September 2019 to October 2020 by collecting a total of 200 umbilical cord blood and matching discharged placental tissue samples from systematic randomly selected pregnant women giving birth at University of Gondar specialized hospital.Latex agglutination test and nested polymerase chain reaction were used for the detections of this infection.Findings: The overall serological, first polymerase chain reaction and nested polymerase chain reaction findings of this study were 46%, 24% and 10%, respectively.The univariant analysis indicated that seropositivity of Toxoplasma gondii antibodies were also significantly influenced by eating raw meat, eating raw vegetables, drinking raw milk, presence of domestic cat contacts and source of water (P ≤ 0.05).In the case of multivariate analysis drinking raw milk and source of water were also significantly associated to the seropositivity of Toxoplasma gondii.Moreover, there were also fair concordant between latex agglutination within first polymerase reaction (Kappa: 0.290) and https://www.indjst.org/