Rash and arthralgia caused by hepatitis E

The general practitioner requested baseline blood tests including full blood count, liver and renal function tests, rheumatoid factor, auto-antibodies and complements, prescribed analgesia, and referred the patient to a rheumatologist. Acute hepatitis E presenting as polyarthritis with longlasting viraemia (up to 7 months) has been reported in an individual who travelled to Egypt during the incubation period.3 By contrast, viraemia was short lived in our case. [...]recently, HEV infection in developed countries was thought to be travel-associated.