1. How serious is HBV?

Now Hepatitis B as most of you know is the most common serious liver infection in the world. There are about 350 to 400 million people worldwide chronically infected compared with 40 million people living with HIV. So eight to ten times more people than HIV. So eight to ten times more people than HIV. And the danger of chronic hepatitis B is without appropriate treatment or monitoring one in four will eventually die from liver cancer, cirrhosis or liver failure. In fact, hepatitis B many people forget, takes anywhere between 700,000 to one million lives a year. And what is so appalling is we have had a vaccine for over twenty-five years to prevent it and in most parts of the world we are still not implementing an effective vaccination program to eliminate this disease. So I mean there is all this talk about an HIV vaccine. If you look at the hep B vaccine as the President, you know you may have a HIV vaccine people twenty years later will probably be bickering as to who should be getting it and people continue to get infected and people continue to die.