Abstract
Rheumatic fever (RF) is a major medical problem in the developing world and so-called "hotspots", where the incidence is still 20-300 per 100,000 populations, causing about 500,000 deaths per year, not much different era pre-antibiotic era. In previous work we describe the influence of the Interleukin-1 Receptor Antagonist gene (IL1RN) polymorphism in the severity of carditis in a cohort …