Hepatitis B is a highly infectious disease that could be contracted through a body-to-body contact or via blood transfusion. A very large number of people around the world are infected but a few of them get to the chronic stage of that disease. Persons originating from China, Africa, Asia, South America, the Pacific islands, or the Middle East are in fact more exposed and more likely to get the HBV (Hepatitis B Virus) at least once in their lives. Most of the time, treatment is as simple as a long rest and a balanced diet, but in other rare cases HBV proves to be highly resistant and patients could end up with a liver failure or even a liver cancer.
Taking the United States as a sample area we could come up with alarming statistics about Hepatitis B. In fact, every year almost 200,000 people get the HBV in the USA, more than 10% of them are treated in hospitals, and 20% get to the chronic stage. It’s mainly due to their natural disposal to have such a disease or to their life mode. In general, approximately 1.25 million people have a chronic hepatitis B in the USA, and an estimated 4000 to 5000 people die because of pathologies caused by the HBV. Almost 300 million inhabitants of the world are chronically infected.
Hepatitis B infection reached a high score during the 1980’s, but started to decrease the following decade. It was mainly due to the beginning of the world using vaccination. People were actually more precisely informed about the risks of such a contamination and started to avoid suspicious practises that could lead to the infection. However, some categories of people continue to be more exposed than others: Men who practice sex with other men and drug addicts.
There is no special treatment for Hepatitis B, but vaccination could be the best preventive way to stop the infection spread among people. It helps immune against both acute and chronic HBV. Three doses are needed to get become completely protected against the virus. This is actually quite recommended for those kind of people:
- Newly-born born infants
- Children between the ages of 11 and 12 that were never vaccinated before.
- People of different ages that are highly exposed due to their professions or their environment.
Hepatitis B vaccination has started since the beginning of the 1980’s and proved to be quite efficient when administered to both children and adults. The vaccine has some slight side effects like a sort of pain at the injection area and a very mild fever after being vaccinated. Those effects are more likely to affect those who have the vaccine for the first time than others. More than 200 million doses of the Hepatitis B vaccine have been given in the USA during the last decade. Since the time people got more aware of the utility of prevention the disease has been quite controlled over the world and fewer patients die because of such a virus.