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Category Archives: Hepatitis B Advocacy

Hepatitis B Advocacy, Living with Hepatitis B

Join Us for a Twitter Interview! Meet Our Storytellers and Learn Their Hepatitis B Stories

#justB-Twittervu-blogThe Hepatitis B Foundation is proud to launch its storytelling campaign, sharing the stories of people living with and affected by hepatitis B. Join the Twitter interview at 2 p.m. (EST), Tuesday, May 16, hosted by the Hepatitis B Foundation and StoryCenter.

We will introduce three of our storytellers and their stories. Join the Twitter interview with the hashtag #justB and hear the poignant stories of real people living with hep B.

We will be introducing Jason, Bunmi and Maureen K. Jason, was in a difficult place in his life with addiction and depression when he learned of his hepatitis B and sought treatment. Bunmi, originally from Nigeria, talks about the loss of her father to hepatitis B- related liver cancer and the unwillingness of her family to talk about his disease. Maureen’s hepatitis B journey began with the adoption of her daughter, and the struggle with disclosure with family and friends. These brave storytellers are ready to put an end to the silence surrounding hepatitis B.

Below are the topics scheduled for discussion during the Twitter interview. How can you contribute to the conversation? Please support Jason, Bunmi and Maureen K. as they disclose their hepatitis B stories on social media. Consider sharing parts of your hep B story or pose a question. Join the conversation with the hashtag #justB.

T1. Tell us about hepatitis B, the storytelling campaign and what the foundation hopes to achieve for those affected by hepatitis B.
T2. What makes hepatitis B different from other diseases, and how do these stories highlight the challenges associated with hepatitis B?
T3. We’d like to open it up to our storytellers. Please tell us about your story, and what makes hepatitis B different from other diseases.
T4. How has hepatitis B affected your life?
T5. What made you decide to share your hepatitis B story? Were you concerned with the stigma associated with hepatitis B?
T6. Describe your experience meeting with others impacted by hepatitis B.
T7. If there is one message you would like to get across to others about coping with #hepatitis B, what would it be?
T8: What would you tell others that are struggling with whether or not they should share their hepatitis B story?

Co-hosts and special guest handles include:

Be sure to watch Jason, Bunmi and MaureenK‘s stories.

Are you just getting started with Twitter and want to know how to join the conversation?  Type #justB in the search box of the Twitter application and click on the “latest option” to follow the twitter view.

#justB in search box

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can prepare any questions or tweets you might have for the above participants in advance, or you can also tweet on the fly, re-tweet, or Like a tweet from the chat.

The topics are labeled T1, T2, etc. so please respond/answer specific topic by using A1, A2, etc. in front of your tweets. Remember to include the #justB hashtag, which is not case sensitive, in all of your tweets.

Looking forward to sharing the stories of our guests on the Twitter view. Please welcome them by joining the conversation!

Hepatitis B Advocacy, Living with Hepatitis B

People Affected by Hepatitis B Share Stories of Family Secrets, Stigma and Diagnoses That Came Too Late

Alan Wang of Berkeley, CA, describes how doctors failed to test his family for hepatitis B in his video story.
Alan Wang of Berkeley, CA, describes how doctors failed to test his family for hepatitis B in his video story.

In an innovative storytelling initiative, people living with chronic hepatitis B open their hearts and share their stories of family secrets, stigma and diagnoses that came too late as they confront the impact of hepatitis B on themselves and the people they love.

The Hepatitis B Foundation, working with StoryCenter, has created unique video stories that share the experiences of people affected by hepatitis B, which affects one-third of the world’s population. The video stories, which debut May 1 in recognition of Hepatitis Awareness Month, are designed to raise awareness about the liver disease that affects 2 million in the U.S.

There is no better way to understand the human toll hepatitis B takes than to hear directly from those affected. Most people know very little about this disease and up to 75 percent of people living with hepatitis B don’t know they’re infected. The hope is that these stories will put a human face on this infection and help improve testing, vaccination and treatment.

One storytelling video, featuring former ABC 7 News anchor Alan Wang of Berkeley, CA, talks about how doctors fail to test people for hepatitis B. It was after the CEO of Newsworthy Media suffered liver damage that a doctor tested him for hepatitis B. “It was only because I (had) a medical reporter friend who connected me to a leading hepatologist that I got the attention I needed,” Wang, 49, explains in his story. After his diagnosis, he encouraged family members to be tested and his mother and siblings were also found to be infected by the disease that is easily transmitted at birth.

justB“We were left to connect the dots because the medical profession is failing to address an epidemic that kills more than 700,000 people a year,” he explained. “It’s bad enough that hepatitis B is a silent killer with few symptoms until it’s too late. It’s also ignored by Asian cultures that consider talk about deadly diseases to be taboo.”

While a safe and effective vaccine that prevents hepatitis B has been available since 1982, many Americans did not have access to the vaccine. John Ellis Jr., another hepatitis B storyteller who lives in Pensacola, FL, was diagnosed with chronic hepatitis B at age 16. He, like many people living with hepatitis B, does not know how he became infected.

“When I was first diagnosed, I was shocked the doctor couldn’t tell me how I contracted it, as if finding out how I contracted hepatitis B would somehow cure me of it. As I grow older, what’s most important to me is maintaining my health.” Ellis explains in his story that he wants to be, “bigger than his diagnosis.” He does not want hepatitis to hold him back or define him. He is an entrepreneur and he has organized a charity bike ride to raise awareness and funding for research.

Another featured storyteller is pharmacist Bunmi Daramaja, of Elkridge, MD, who grew up in Nigeria and emigrated to the U.S. She struggled with her family’s reluctance to discuss her father’s death from liver cancer, resulting from chronic hepatitis B.

“Stigma is everywhere (in my African culture),” she explained in her story. “People don’t think about the facts of how the virus is transmitted– they are afraid to even touch someone who has it. Many people don’t even want to get tested, because treatment is either not available or costs too much money. They say, ‘What’s the point?’ This needs to change.

“In the U.S., the services are here, and I want to make sure that people of African origin know there are resources. I want to end this silence,” she explained.

The Hepatitis B Foundation’s Storytelling page helps tell the story about an infection in the U.S. that is under-diagnosed, under-treated and remains stigmatized across America.

Hepatitis B Advocacy

How Do We Raise Awareness About Hepatitis B Without Reinforcing Racist Stereotypes?

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2013-05-17_HepbUnitedEventBy Christine Kukka

When my daughter thinks about how active she should be in raising awareness about hepatitis B,  she gets tripped up by racial identity and politics.

Recently, she attended a workshop where people living with hepatitis B told their stories. It was empowering and energizing, and then she went home to a state where the majority are white, the governor claims immigrants are bringing in new diseases, and no one has ever heard about hepatitis B.

“Suddenly, I feel paralyzed,” she told me. “I look at the other people in my hepatitis B group and all of us were Asian or Black. I’m afraid if I tell my story here at home that everyone will assume everyone who’s Asian has hepatitis B.”

Instead of increasing white America’s compassion and empathy towards people with hepatitis B, she fears it might make them more afraid of people of color. Her fears are understandable. In this era of Trump, hate crimes and backlash against immigrants have increased. She’s afraid speaking out might unwittingly reinforce simmering racist stereotypes. She wonders if she has that much courage.

She’s worried about how it will affect her personally. Already she sees some clients she works with gravitate and open up more to her white coworkers. “I don’t know if I’m over-thinking it all, and feeling overwhelmed about how to handle this,” she confided.

There is a story about a Asian-American researcher who worked on hepatitis B for decades. When she conducted some independent screening in her community and discovered that a large percentage of Korean-Americans tested positive for hepatitis B, she was fearful. She never published her findings, she was afraid it would fuel racism against Asian-American immigrants. She chose self-censorship instead.

Much has been written lately about how much more empathy the American public and some politicians appear to have toward the rural opiate addiction crisis now that it has a “white face,” given that addiction in inner cities has decimated generations of African-Americans for decades.

Does my daughter intuitively know that America has far more sympathy (and dedicates more funding) for diseases that affect white and middle-class communities than minority populations?

I try to give her another take on the situation, suggesting that the human map of hepatitis B is defined by access to healthcare. People in poor regions of the world don’t have access to the hepatitis B vaccine birth dose, which must be administered within 12 hours of birth to break the mother-to-child infection cycle, or to sterile syringes and medical equipment.

I explain it’s the same in rural America. The hepatitis B vaccine has been available since 1982 and recommended for all children and adolescents, yet today there is an uptick in new hepatitis B infections among injecting drug users. Uninsured adults who didn’t have access to preventive healthcare and the hepatitis B vaccine growing up are now getting infected from the opioid epidemic. Just like Africa and Asia, medical insurance and access to healthcare defines who lives and dies.

Just like Africa and Asia, in rural and low-income America, access to insurance and healthcare defines who lives and dies.

In the late 1980s, a young group of AIDS activists created ACT Up, a noisy, boisterous group that fought the government and big pharma in order to speed up the AIDS drug approval process. They even took over the National Institutes of Health office at one point and unfurled a banner that read: Silence = Death.

For a long time, white America thought everyone who was gay had AIDS. But over time, they stopped making that assumption. It takes time, education, and tireless and selfless advocacy. We all do what we can, when we can.

Hepatitis B Advocacy

Advocate Nadine Shiroma Champions Civil Rights for All Affected by Hepatitis B

Nadine Shiroma and her grandchild.
Nadine Shiroma and her grandchild.

By Nadine Shiroma

I am a retiree and volunteer working to address hepatitis B discrimination, which involves a serious, relatively unknown chronic disease that impacts Asian-American and Pacific Islander American (AAPIA) immigrants and refugees who are often isolated by culture and language, which makes this discrimination especially egregious.

As a fifth-generation AAPIA, I’d heard of hepatitis B but was not aware that it leads to cirrhosis or liver cancer or that AAPIAs make up 50 percent of the country’s estimated 2 million hepatitis B cases, but represent less than 5 percent of the U.S. population.

These facts came into sharp focus in 2010, when a college senior was devastated to learn she would not be permitted to enroll in a healthcare program due to her chronic hepatitis B. Nothing in the school’s admissions policy or information published by the profession’s national admissions coordinating agency had prepared the student for this. When the student informed me that an older friend with hepatitis B was completing a similar healthcare program at a different institution, I advised her to challenge her school’s exclusion policy.

The issue raised many questions that called for research and consultation with hepatitis B specialists and community health and civil rights advocates to find out how and why schools were permitted to have such different hepatitis B policies. I also sought to compare various institutional policies with their respective state licensing laws for providers with hepatitis B. Fortunately, I was referred to an attorney who had an understanding of the disease who challenged the school’s exclusion policy. This led to the school’s implementation of a new, progressive policy for students with chronic hepatitis B.

Though gratified with the outcome for this student, I feared other students with hepatitis B would face similar discrimination, because too many medical school policies barring enrollment of students with hepatitis B were undisclosed. Future victims might not know how or where to access assistance or legal help. Given the World Health Organization’s map of global regions with high rates of hepatitis B and the current patterns of U.S. immigration, I believed hepatitis B discrimination would soon impact other immigrant/refugee communities.

My initial contact with the Hepatitis B Foundation in 2010 developed into a working relationship that won justice for five additional medical and dental students who contacted us between 2011 and 2013.

At the urging of the foundation and hepatitis B specialists,  the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) revised and updated its 20-year old policy for infected healthcare workers; and the disability complaint I filed with the Department of Justice (DOJ) resulted in a Settlement Agreement for two students and a Technical Assistance Letter jointly issued by three federal agencies to inform healthcare schools of their responsibilities to accommodate individuals with hepatitis B and point out that failure to comply could also violate Title VI, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity or national origin.

Hepatitis B civil rights advocacy is now focused on policies of all U.S. military services, including the Coast Guard, Public Health Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which ban individuals with hepatitis B from joining.

Between 2013 and 2016, we advised nine active duty personnel and students who were not permitted to enlist for military service or scholarship programs or were discharged from active duty or a U.S. military academy due to hepatitis B. We continue to advocate for the Department of Defense to revise the policies that prohibit the people with chronic hepatitis B and establish reasonable, science-based accommodation policies for existing or future personnel who are diagnosed with chronic hepatitis B

Continuing hepatitis B education and civil rights challenges

Most immigrants and refugees do not understand the seriousness of the silent disease or the importance of hepatitis B screening. If diagnosed with hepatitis B, they often fear being treated as ‘pariahs’ in a society where they already feel like outsiders; or they worry that others in their family will be stigmatized or that hepatitis B will be used as an excuse to prevent immigrants from entering the U.S. Still others may be silenced by a code of silence within their professions.

Adding complexity to hepatitis B education and outreach are the diverse languages and cultures of the immigrant/refugee communities, along with the economic and social disparities experienced by so many families who start new lives in the U.S. living in relative isolation with limited English proficiency and few financial resources.

Lest we think hepatitis B discrimination is limited to Asian- and African-American and immigrant/refugee communities, new pockets of hepatitis B infection linked to the opioid epidemic have been reported in rural regions. Outbreaks of hepatitis B infection in majority white, non-immigrant, economically-depressed regions suggest that some of those infected may not have been immunized due to a lack of knowledge or healthcare access. These are social and economic disparities that mirror the disparities experienced by many immigrant/refugee families.

Like their healthier peers, teens and young adults with hepatitis B seek opportunities to fulfill their potential, earn a living wage and improve their lives. To this end, hepatitis B advocates are working to protect the rights of infected persons and ensure that our schools and institutions, and public and private employers administer reasonable, science-based chronic hepatitis B policies and accommodations.

Nadine Shiroma is a community civil and voting rights advocate and policy advisor to the Hepatitis B Foundation. She can be contacted at nadine.shiroma@gmail.com.

Diagnosed in March, 2009, with stage 4 metastatic non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Nadine spent the remainder of the year undergoing chemotherapy and recurrent hospitalizations. “That I lived and recovered is due to doctors at the City of Hope Cancer Research Center, my family and especially my husband and daughter,” she recalled. “Assisting the college senior in 2010 helped me discover a new normalcy. On that day in 2011, when a new, progressive chronic hepatitis B accommodation policy was published by the healthcare school that previously excluded students with hepatitis B, I told myself, ‘This is why I lived.’”

 

Hepatitis B Advocacy, Living with Hepatitis B

Time to End the Military’s Ban on Enlistees with Hepatitis B

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Image courtesy of vectorolie at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.
Image courtesy of vectorolie at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

By Christine Kukka

One of the most glaring civil rights abuses facing people with hepatitis B in the United States today is the military’s continued refusal to allow anyone with chronic hepatitis B to enlist.

This prohibition continues, despite the fact that all military personnel are vaccinated against hepatitis B, and scientific data shows hepatitis B is not spread through casual contact.

“Our brave servicemen and women deserve nothing less than the best, yet many qualified individuals are being prevented from serving in specific roles and/or being promoted within the military’s ranks. That’s simply wrong,” said U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., in a letter challenging the military’s Uniform Code of Military Justice prohibits people with hepatitis B and C and HIV from enlisting in the Navy, Army, Air Force, Coast Guard, Marine Corps and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

This outdated and scientifically-baseless Department of Defense policy damages the civil liberties of many Americans.

  • Asian and Pacific Islander Americans, African and Middle Eastern immigrants and other ethnic groups are disproportionately impacted by hepatitis B. For example, Asian-Americans make up less than 5 percent of the total U.S. population but account for more than 50 percent of the 2 million people living with hepatitis B cases in the U.S.
  • Immigrants and their children are also disproportionately affected by hepatitis B, due to the lack of vaccinations in their countries of origin. As a result, they are barred from military service, which offers a path to citizenship.

What is especially heart-breaking are the young men and women who work hard to get into prestigious military academies, only to be dismissed when it’s discovered they have hepatitis B.

military-662872_1920This military code historically barred people with serious medical conditions because they were considered unfit to serve, suspected to incur high healthcare costs and could pose an infection risk to fellow soldiers.

The code prohibits enlistees with the, “Presence of … current acute or chronic hepatitis carrier state, hepatitis in the preceding six months or persistence of symptoms after six months, or objective evidence of impairment of liver function.”

But most people with chronic hepatitis B who want to enlist are healthy, have no liver damage, do not pose an infection risk to others, and are capable of performing the same duties required of their fellow recruits. Clearly, military policy has not caught up with current science.

This discriminatory policy is difficult to challenge, despite the best efforts of advocates including Rep. Lee and U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R–FL).

The Americans with Disabilities Act, which prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities and chronic diseases such as HIV and hepatitis B and C, unfortunately has no jurisdiction over the Department of Defense.

Although the Department of Justice and CDC have issued clear, science-based guidelines that find hepatitis B-infected healthcare providers to pose no infection threat to patients or coworkers, the military continues to practice its discriminatory policies, which rob the military of talented and motivated recruits.

It is time to change these outdated and discriminatory policies. There are many good men and women waiting, willing and able.

Hepatitis B Advocacy, Hepatitis B Treatment

The Terrible Price Paid When Doctors Fail to Test and Treat Patients for Hepatitis B

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Image courtesy of Janpen04081986 at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.
Image courtesy of Janpen04081986 at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

By Christine Kukka

The day we arrived home from China, my husband and I brought our four-month-old adopted daughter to a pediatrician for a check-up. The doctor looked at my daughter’s health records from China, saw she had tested negative for hepatitis B, and said, “Good, I don’t have to test her for that.”

About a year later, I got sick, very sick. I felt nauseous, my stomach hurt and I felt bone tired. I gradually recovered and chalked it up to a bad case of flu.

When my daughter was 2 years old, I read on an adoption email list that some children were testing positive for hepatitis B stateside, though their medical reports in China had given them a clean bill of health. During her next check-up, I asked the pediatrician to test her for hepatitis B. The test result came back positive. A week later, so did mine.

My daughter had chronic hepatitis B, and I, who had donated blood regularly until I became a busy parent, had  an acute case, and cleared the infection. Our story, unfortunately, is not uncommon. Across the U.S., many primary care doctors fail to test at-risk patients for hepatitis B.

I live in a rural, New England state where there are not many people from countries with high rates of hepatitis B. Our pediatrician didn’t know that it can take several weeks after exposure  for an infection to show up in a lab test. She didn’t know that China’s medical records weren’t reliable. She knows it now, but many providers still don’t.

Over the years, I have heard many similar stories with worse outcomes. In one case, a young woman born in South Korea suffered epilepsy and her doctor treated her with a common seizure medication without first screening her for liver infection or damage. She died in her early 20s from liver cancer. The epilepsy drug accelerated her hepatitis B-related liver disease.

A recent article published on the Monthly Prescribing Reference website, describes how a primary care provider was sued for malpractice after he failed to monitor a patient for liver damage despite the fact the Asian-American patient told him he had hepatitis B in his teens. The patient, who was treated by the doctor for more than 15 years, died from liver cancer resulting from untreated hepatitis B.

In addition to these stories, there are numerous studies published in medical journals that show doctors often fail to test patients for hepatitis B or treat them appropriately when hepatitis B is diagnosed. Even liver experts who should know better often don’t follow medical guidelines that recommend antiviral treatment for hepatitis B-related liver damage.

I often wonder why there is this breakdown in hepatitis B care. I wonder if it stems from racism or prejudice. Many people with hepatitis B are people of color, recent immigrants, gay, or low-income. These patients can be challenging for doctors, especially when providers have little experience with hepatitis B, but that’s no excuse.

Over the years, I have accompanied my daughter to her medical appointments and often remind doctors what labs they should order and what the latest monitoring guidelines are. The best of them admit they don’t know how to treat hepatitis B and sit down and read the latest guidelines and discuss a care plan with my daughter. The worse simply do whatever I ask, and I am no doctor.

martin luther king blue I have found one of the best tools available  are software programs that link a patient’s electronic medical record to current medical guidelines. It makes it easy for doctors to know what tests should be ordered, especially if they have never treated hepatitis B before. But they need to have the software and the desire to use it.

I appreciate that doctors are human, over-worked and are driven by an assembly line business model that makes it hard to pause and research a new medical condition. However, the human price paid for lapses in care is terrible, and far more costly considering the expense of treating liver cancer, compared to running the right tests and prescribing the correct antiviral treatment today.

In the U.S., about two-thirds of people living with chronic hepatitis B don’t know they’re infected. They don’t have the money, the insurance coverage, or access to the right doctors who will test and treat them, and make sure their family members are tested and vaccinated. An estimated 20 percent of these people will die prematurely from liver disease. And today, as I listen to the news, I am afraid it’s only going to get worse.

Hepatitis B Advocacy

Like Hepatitis B, Addiction Is a Chronic Disease That Needs Treatment Without Judgement

addictionBy Christine Kukka

Addiction is a chronic disease, like hepatitis B, type II diabetes, cancer and heart disease. These diseases all run in families, are influenced by environment and behavior, and are notoriously difficult to treat.

No one chooses to develop diabetes or heart disease. Nor do they choose to be a drug addict or alcoholic, or infected with hepatitis B. Yet, how we view and treat people with these chronic diseases varies drastically.

As a society, we view heart disease as a tragic occurrence. It kills roughly the same number of people as cancer, lower respiratory diseases and accidents combined and costs us more than $316.6 billion in health care and lost productivity.

But most heart disease is preventable and results from an inability to make wise choices about food and exercise. Yet, when we hear about a heart attack, we don’t shake our heads and say, “If only they had exercised more,” or, “too bad they didn’t have enough self-control to lay off the junk food.”

alcoholicBut we do say that about smoking, drug addiction and alcoholism, and about some of the chronic infectious diseases that result, such as hepatitis B or C or HIV.

How often do we who have hepatitis B quickly tell our friends that we were infected at birth, to make sure they know it wasn’t from drugs or promiscuity? Even we who live with hepatitis B can get caught up in the notion that some hepatitis B cases carry shame and others do not.

If we can get past our moral judgements about addiction and view it instead as the chronic disease it is, maybe we can also stop moralizing and judging people with STIs or viral hepatitis or HIV. Maybe we can finally get better at talking about it, preventing it and treating it.

There is overlap between “respectable” chronic diseases like cancer and heart disease and stigmatized diseases like addiction to tobacco, alcohol or street drugs. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse:

  • Tobacco contributes to 11 to 30 percent of cancer deaths and 30 percent of heart disease deaths each year.
  • Tobacco, cocaine, amphetamines, alcohol and steroids all contribute to heart disease.
  • Injecting drug use contributes to one-third of HIV/AIDS cases and most hepatitis C cases, and is now responsible for an increase in new hepatitis B infections in many rural states, despite the availability of a safe and effective vaccine.

We need to re-orient our views of addiction if we are ever to treat it scientifically. Everyone with a chronic disease deserves treatment, quality care and respect.

Between 200,000 and 300,000 people are infected with hepatitis B in the U.S. each year, 20 percent are injecting drug users.  More than 80 percent of drug users who have been injecting for a decade or longer have been infected with hepatitis B.

We need effective treatment for all addictions, no matter if the drug of choice is tobacco, alcohol, heroin, fast food, sweets, or an opioid prescribed by a doctor.

April is Alcohol Awareness Month, let’s take a moment to recognize our own prejudices and discard them for the sake of all touched by the chronic disease of addiction.

Hepatitis B Advocacy, Living with Hepatitis B

March 1 is Zero Discrimination Day: Ending Hepatitis B Stigma Starts with Us

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2017-zero-discrimination-day_en.pdfBy Christine Kukka

Around the world, millions of people with chronic hepatitis B face wrenching discrimination that limits their dreams, education, careers, income and personal relationships. Here are examples:

  • A Vietnamese woman working in a hotel in Dubai is found to have hepatitis B and is fired, isolated, deported and given a life-time ban on re-entering the country.
  • A young person from the Philippines, aspiring to increase her income to support her impoverished family, is hired to work in Saipan, but her work visa is suddenly cancelled by the employment agency when it discovers she has hepatitis B.
  • A young man from the state of Washington, who worked hard in high school to get into the Naval Academy, is summarily dismissed within days of his arrival when it’s discovered he has hepatitis B. The U.S. military continues to bar people with hepatitis B from serving.

All of this discrimination is unethical, unnecessary and a violation of human rights. Hepatitis B is simply not transmitted through casual contact. The stigma that persists is based on ignorance and it impacts millions around the world daily. This is why we need to recognize Zero Discrimination Day on Wednesday, March 1.

Image courtesy of cooldesign at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.
Image courtesy of cooldesign at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

This day, designated by the United Nations, highlights the negative impact of discrimination and promotes tolerance, compassion and peace. Many hepatitis activist organizations, including the Hepatitis B Foundation, is using this celebration to draw attention to global hepatitis B discrimination.

In the U.S., some progress has been made to eradicate the unequal treatment of people affected by chronic hepatitis B infection. In 2012, prompted in part by complaints filed by the foundation, CDC issued new regulations that clarified that hepatitis B should not, “disqualify infected persons from the practice or study of surgery, dentistry, medicine, or allied health fields.” These recommendations and a U.S. Department of Justice letter warned medical, nursing, dental schools that they could not exclude applicants and students with hepatitis B, concluding, “… for most chronically HBV-infected providers and students who conform to current standards for infection control, HBV infection status alone does not require any curtailing of their practices or supervised learning experiences.”

However, today people with hepatitis B can’t even get jobs as hotel maids in many countries in the Middle East and Asia. Fear and ignorance, and reluctance by government officials to outlaw these discriminatory practices, have allowed these rules that diminish basic human rights to continue. The young woman who was exiled from Dubai, wrote of her experience:

“When I was 21, I had my internship in Dubai and needed to undergo a blood test. I was not aware of the rules in that country so when I was tested positive, the hotel that I worked for isolated me. I was going through a very hard time because I was completely alone in a foreign country. My work visa was canceled, they brought me to a place that looked like a jail, they took my iris scan, and I was deported along with a lifetime ban, which means I can never come back to that country again. That was the most horrible memory in my life. I am still scared every time I think about it. Sometimes I cannot sleep at night, I keep blaming, cursing myself for having this kind of virus inside my body.”

Image courtesy of meepoohfoto at FreeDigitalPhotos.net,
Image courtesy of meepoohfoto at FreeDigitalPhotos.net,

No one is to blame for hepatitis B, including the millions who were infected at birth or from unsafe and contaminated syringes and medical devices. There is a safe and effective vaccine that prevents hepatitis B today. When people are protected, there is no reason to fear that healthcare workers or hotel maids will spread this infection.

It is morally reprehensible that given the tools and knowledge we have that this discrimination should continue today.

Every day is zero discrimination day, and ending discrimination starts with us working individually in any way we can in our communities to end this stigma.

Make the NOhep:NOexcuse pledge and take simple actions to help eliminate viral hepatitis. It only takes a minute to pledge your support! 

The United Nations first celebrated Zero Discrimination Day on March 1, 2014, after UNAIDS, a UN program on human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), launched its Zero Discrimination Campaign on World AIDS Day.

Hepatitis B Advocacy, Hepatitis B Prevention

Facing the Threat of Hepatitis B Following Sexual Coercion or Assault

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Image courtesy of tuelekza at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.
Image courtesy of tuelekza at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

By Christine Kukka

Around the world, the most common way hepatitis B is spread is through sex — and sometimes it’s not consensual.

In the United States, sexual transmission of hepatitis B accounts for nearly two-thirds of acute or new cases in adults. According to a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report, about one in five women and one in 71 men reported experiencing rape at some point in their lives. And abusers rarely use condoms.

One of the hardest things to talk about is the relationship between how hepatitis B is spread and sexual assault or coercion – defined as anytime a woman, man or child is forced to submit to sex either through rape or assault, or with a partner who refuses to use a condom.

About one in 20 women and men (5.6% and 5.3% respectively) experienced sexual violence, such as sexual coercion or unwanted sexual contact in the 12 months prior to the CDC’s survey; and 13 percent of women and 6 percent of men reported they had experienced sexual coercion at some time in their lives. Among women, most abusers were intimate partners, family members or acquaintances. Among males, most perpetrators were acquaintances.

Research suggests these figures under-estimates the true prevalence of sexual violence around the world, which endangers public health on many levels. There is the mental trauma victims experience and there is the spread of sexually-transmitted infections, such as hepatitis B and HIV.

Hepatitis B is 50- to 100-times more infectious than HIV and can be passed through the exchange of body fluids, such as semen, vaginal fluids and blood. The CDC recommends the following steps to protect against hepatitis B following sexual assault.

When the perpetrator has hepatitis B (is positive for the hepatitis B surface antigen-HBsAg):

  • If the victim has never been vaccinated, he or she should receive the hepatitis B vaccine series and also receive a dose of HBIG (hepatitis B antibodies).
  • If the victim has been vaccinated in the past, he or she should immediately get a hepatitis B vaccine dose (called a booster dose.)

When the perpetrator’s hepatitis B status is not known:

  • If the victim has not been immunized against hepatitis B, he or she should received the hepatitis B vaccine series.
  • If the victim has already been vaccinated against hepatitis B, no treatment is needed.

In South Africa, for example, women’s inability to control their lives sexually is fueling the HIV epidemic. One study that followed 1,500 pregnant women who were in married or stable relationships found an astonishing HIV infection rate of 38 percent. Many reported having been abused physically and sexually in the recent past, which helps explain why AIDS is now the biggest killer of young women in southern Africa.

Image courtesy of Sira Anamwong at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Image courtesy of Sira Anamwong at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Sexual assault is not always accompanied by physical violence. A woman may not have the power to require her partner to use a condom without risking physical or verbal abuse, or a person may not tell his or her sexual partner that they have hepatitis B. Coercion can be silent, and fueled by ignorance and low self-esteem.

Here is an email that the Hepatitis B Foundation recently received that illustrates this: “My boyfriend is hepatitis B and C positive, as he was a drug addict. We had unprotected sex often over two to three months. I want to ask, is there any chance of myself being infected?”

Sadly, this woman is at very high risk of infection, especially from hepatitis B. What stopped her from insisting he wear a condom or walking away from a relationship with a man who had little concern for her health and welfare?

Poverty, a lack of choices, resources and education, and a host of other factors stop victims from walking away from their abusers every day around the world.

To protect the health of people around the world, we need to fight in any way we can to stop sexual violence, protect women’s reproductive health, and enable everyone to control their lives.

In southern Africa, researchers have come up with a vaginal ring that contains anti-HIV drugs and discreetly protects a woman from HIV infection, without requiring her to negotiate condom use with an abuser inside or outside her marriage.

But this treats a symptom, not the disease of sexual violence that spreads trauma, fear and diseases such as hepatitis B. However we can, whenever we can, we must work to make a difference.

Hepatitis B Advocacy, Hepatitis B Prevention, Living with Hepatitis B

The Hepatitis B Community Cringes As Vaccine Skeptics Take the Stage in Washington

Image courtesy of Tuomas_Lehtinen at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Image courtesy of Tuomas_Lehtinen at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

By Christine Kukka

In a profound blow to science, public health and the hepatitis B community, President-elect Donald Trump is reportedly asking Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who believes that vaccines cause autism — to chair a national commission on vaccines.

Countless studies show vaccines are safe and effective and do not cause autism. The hepatitis B vaccine alone has contributed to an 82 percent drop in this deadly liver disease in the U.S. since 1991. Before universal childhood immunizations became available, one in 20 Americans had been infected with hepatitis B. Sadly, that spectacular success has not quieted vaccine skeptics.

It is heart-breaking to hear that an anti-vaccine activist may gain a public forum to promote his scientifically-unfounded opinions. If the hepatitis B vaccine had been available to my daughter and millions of others around the world at birth, there would be fewer people with chronic hepatitis B, fewer deaths from liver disease and cancer and far less anguish, fear and stigma. Vaccines safely and effectively prevent disease, and all of us who have been touched by hepatitis B can attest to their life-saving value.

Let’s review the indisputable scientific facts about vaccines, and why this controversy has resurfaced.

In 1998, the well-respected medical journal Lancet published a paper by researcher Andrew Wakefield and 12 of his colleagues linking a standard measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine and its preservative  thimerosal to autism. Despite its tiny sample size (just 12 children) and its speculative conclusions, the study was publicized and bolstered the anti-vaccine movement.

The study proved to be a fraud. Editors of the Lancet later retracted the report, and additional investigations into the study found some of children in the study did even have autism. But the damage was done and hepatitis B vaccine makers and others scrambled to remove thimerasol from their vaccines to counter the undocumented claims that it posed a threat to children. A thimerasol-free, hepatitis B vaccine became available in  late 1999.

Image courtesy of meepoohfoto at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.
Image courtesy of meepoohfoto at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

But parents in the U.S. increasingly chose not to vaccinate their children, even after the disappearance of thimerasol. They didn’t like all the shots their babies were given, and vaccines became victims of their own success. They were so effective that parents began to believe their children were no longer at risk of these vaccine-preventable diseases and did not need immunization.

Before the measles vaccine became available, there were 500,000 cases of measles annually in the U.S. and 500 deaths. By 2000, due to universal immunization, measles had been eradicated. Then the anti-vaccine movement took hold and more and more parents chose not to vaccinate their children. In 2014, the U.S. experienced 667 cases of measles in 27 states, including an outbreak at Disneyland. This is what happens when parents stop vaccinating their children.

What is so piercing and terrible is that millions of us would be free of hepatitis B if only we had been vaccinated at birth or during childhood.

To arouse suspicion about vaccines that save millions of people every day is unforgivable. My daughter has hepatitis B today because this vaccine was not available when she was born. To plant false seeds of doubt about a life-saving vaccine undermines all we have worked for in our effort to eradicate hepatitis B in the next 30 years.

“A conspiracy theory such as the one about the autism vaccine is like an untreated wound,” wrote Michael Specter recently in The New Yorker. “It has festered for years, and yesterday Trump and Kennedy guaranteed that it can only deepen—causing tremendous destruction and needless pain.”

For factual information about vaccine safety, schedules, and why babies are given so many vaccines, click here.

Baruch S. Blumberg Institute