10. What are the available treatments for hepatitis B and what are they used for?

There are two types of drugs - one we call the immune modulator (interferon) and one is the antiviral, which actually suppresses the virus from multiplying. So if you don't have a lot of virus (less than a few hundred thousand), then you don't want to use the antivirals. If your ALT is 80 and your viral count is a few million, then the rationale for treatment is to prevent further damage to your liver so that you hopefully do not develop cirrhosis, and also hopefully that it will decrease the incidence of liver cancer (although this has not yet been proven in hepatitis B, but it has in hepatitis C).