Socioeconomics Conditionality of Seroprevalence of Hepatitis a in Three South-West Cantons of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The prospective study, which was made from Jan 1st 2009. till Dec 31st 2010. in the Clinic for Infectious Diseases within Clinical Hospital Mostar has been implemented in the areas of three southwestern cantons of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. We wanted to define the seroprevalence of the researched area using seroepidemiological testing of different groups of the population, based on the distribution by sex, age, education, residence and watersupply. The aim of this research was to prove the hypothesis that the decrease of seroprevalency of Hepatitis A has been directly related to the improvement of socio-economic conditions of life that at the end brought the decrease of the total prevalence in patients in younger age groups. The total of 420 examinees from the reasserted sample were analysed and they were classify into age groups. The first group was for the children up to 10 years. Then the group 11-20 follows and etc up to the last group, that complies examinees older than 60. In this way we have got seven groups of 60 examinees, from which the half of them was urban, and the other half was rural inhabitants. In every group analysed the half of examinees were females and the other half were males. The results we acquired with this research did not show any statistically relevant differences of seroprevalence of Hepatitits A between the urban and rural areas, between the sexes, nor between the populations which used different wattersupply objects. A statistically relevant difference was found between populations of different levels of education, but the most important difference was found between seroprevalency in different age groups. Seroprevalence in younger age groups was substantially low and increased in groups rising with age. Comparing this data to results from other similair researches from developed and undeveloped countries we concluded that the researched area, by the level of seroprevalency of Hepatitis A belongs to the category of developed countries.