World Hepatitis Day is observed on July 28 to spread global awareness about the disease that is caused globally by five separate viruses, resulting in over 1.34 million deaths yearly and infecting millions more every year. While hepatitis is an acute or chronic inflammation of the liver, viral hepatitis is caused by five different kinds of viruses. On World Hepatitis Day, let’s go over the three main types of hepatitis, their symptoms, precautions, and treatment.
Hepatitis A
Hepatitis A is spread by eating food or drinking water contaminated with infected faeces. Close contact with an infected individual along with the consumption of raw shellfish are common sources of infection as well. The virus causes 1.4 million cases a year across the world.
Symptoms onset within 2–6 weeks of infection and can last up to six months, though in most cases they last for two months. Symptomatic infection is associated with the age of the patient, with children often being infected with asymptomatic infection while adults can see symptomatic infections.
Common symptoms include fatigue, fever, nausea, appetite loss, jaundice, diarrhoea, acholic faeces, and abdominal discomfort. Joint pain is also common as a symptom.
Hepatitis A can be prevented through a vaccine that is administered below the age of 10, that gives protection for up to 20 years.
Hepatitis B
Unlike hepatitis A, hepatitis B is spread through blood or body fluids. As a result, the infection is mostly spread at the time of contact with blood or through contact with the blood of an infected individual during childhood. Other common ways of spreading the infection are intravenous drug use and sexual intercourse. It is important to note that the disease cannot spread through holding hands, sharing eating utensils, kissing, hugging, coughing, sneezing, or breastfeeding.
Symptoms depend on whether an individual is infected with acute or chronic infection of hepatitis B. Acute infections is often associated with the rapid onset of symptoms such as vomiting, yellowish skin, tiredness, dark urine, abdominal pain and eventually jaundice. Symptoms can take anywhere from a month to six months to arrive, and chronic infections may be entirely asymptomatic only to result in cirrhosis and liver cancer.
An effective vaccine with lifelong protection and 95 percent efficacy is available for hepatitis B. Approximately 350 million people worldwide have hepatitis B, most of whom are unaware of their condition. More than 600,000 people die as a result of hepatitis B complications worldwide each year.
Hepatitis C
Similar to hepatitis B, hepatitis C spreads through blood-to-blood contact. This is primarily seen in either blood transfusion in poorer countries and intravenous drug use in developed countries. Other rarer sources of transmission include organ transplants, sexual intercourse, tattooing, sharing of items such as razors, toothbrushes, and manicuring or pedicuring implements, and mother-to-child transmission during pregnancy.
Symptoms are again dependent on whether an individual suffers from chronic (80 percent of cases) or acute (20 percent of cases) infection. While the onset of symptoms can generally occur within 4–12 weeks, acute symptoms may take longer to appear. Fatigue, nausea and vomiting, fever, muscle or joint pains, abdominal pain, decreased appetite and weight loss, jaundice, dark urine, and clay-coloured stools are some of the symptoms seen.
While chronic hepatitis C can result in fatigue and mild cognitive problems, most infections are asymptomatic but do result in cirrhosis or liver cancer after several years.
There is no effective vaccine for hepatitis C as of yet but antiviral medications such as sofosbuvir or simeprevir are highly effective for treating even chronic infections. However, access to these antivirals is limited and such treatment can be extremely expensive. As many as 1.5 million people are infected each year from the disease with 290,000 deaths recorded as a result of hepatitis C.
While two more kinds of hepatitis, hepatitis D and E, exist they are far less common and deadly than the three major ones.
(Edited by : Shloka Badkar)
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