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Virologie

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Rubella in the year 2000 Volume 3, issue 6, Novembre-Décembre 1999

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Service de microbiologie-immunologie, Hôpital Antoine-Béclère, 157, rue de la Porte-de-Trivaux, 92141 Clamart Cedex

Thanks to the use of rubella vaccine, the incidence of rubella has decreased dramatically in most industrialized countries, such as, in United States, European countries and Australia. In Finland and Sweden no case of congenital rubella syndrome have been reported for more than 10 years. In developing countries, large outbreaks still occur since, in 1996, only 28 % of these countries have included rubella vaccine in their national immunization programme. The live rubella vaccine currently distributed in most countries contains the RA 27/3 strain. Vaccine-induced immunity is persistent and adverse events are limited. Safety and efficiency of the newly developed peptide, recombinant or DNA – based vaccines need to be assessed. Presently, most of the methods used to detect rubella antibodies perform well and the difficulties encountered in the interpretation of the results are better known. As for the prenatal diagnosis of congenital rubella, the detection of rubella IgM in fetal blood is about to be replaced by the detection of viral genome in amniotic fluid.