14. How does chronic hepatitis B affect different ethnicities in the U.S.?

Now basically all this data has been staring at us for many years. If you actually look at data back in the 1980s, there are a number of investigators who have found that the incidence of chronic hepatitis B in the Asian community is as high as ten or even fifteen percent in various cities in the U.S. This is the data coming from CDC where they analyzed the incidence of chronic hepatitis B in all the pregnant women who gave birth in 2002. You can see that if you were white or Hispanic, the incidence of chronic hepatitis B in these pregnant woman was about 0.1 percent. If you were African American, it was 0.5 percent. If you were foreign born, Asian Pacific Islander, it was almost nine percent; U.S. born dropped to about 1.4 percent. So of the 23,000 women who gave birth in the U.S. in 2002 with chronic hepatitis B, seventy percent of them were Asian Pacific Islander Americans.