Hepatitis B is a very serious infection. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have reported that viral hepatitis is the leading cause of liver cancer and the most common reason for liver transplantation. The National Library of Medicine writes that hepatitis B infection can be spread through having contact with the blood, semen, vaginal fluids, and other body fluids of someone who already has a hepatitis B infection. Acute hepatitis B illness usually goes away after 2 - 3 weeks and the liver usually returns to normal within 4 - 6 months in almost all patients who are infected. However, some people develop chronic hepatitis which is fatal in about 1% of cases. Furthermore, there is a much higher rate of hepatocellular carcinoma in people who have chronic hepatitis B than is found in the general population.
Brown University has reported "Many high-risk Americans don’t get hepatitis B vaccine." It has been found that more than half of adults at risk for hepatitis B virus remain unvaccinated in a recent study investigating hepatitis B vaccination rates in the United States. There is an effective vaccine for hepatitis B and public health officials have a strong sense of who is at highest risk for this infectious liver disease, and yet tens of thousands of people in the United States contract the virus every year. Researchers at Brown University have found that missed opportunities to administer the vaccine continue to be a reason why infections persist.
Lead author Farah Ladak has found that in a nationally representative sample of high-risk adults, 51.4 percent said they were not vaccinated. And greater than half of them had the potential to receive the vaccine based on their reported contact with health care providers. The respondents in the study’s analysis of more than 15,000 adults to the 2007 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey acknowledged engaging in risk behaviors such as certain sexual practices or needle drug use and could definitively report their hepatitis B status. It has been found from previous research that more than 95 percent new infections in adults occur among people who have such behavioral risk factors.
The researchers found that vaccinations were relatively infrequent among adults who were older than 33, among people with less access to health insurance, and among people who have also not been vaccinated against other diseases such as the flu. And it was found that even among people with access to health care thousands of people were not vaccinated. Places where improved vaccine delivery would make a substantial difference have been identified such as when people are tested for HIV, at the doctor’s office, in a hospital or clinic, and especially in jail. This study adds support to the urging of the Institute of Medicine, which emphasized the importance of seizing opportunities to vaccinate people for hepatitis B and C in a 2010 report.
