World Hepatitis Day 2019

Poza stire - World Hepatitis Day 2019

What is World Hepatitis Day?

World Hepatitis Day is a public health holiday held every year on July the 28th in order to educate people on this condition, to raise awareness of the global impact of viral hepatitis and to enforce the need of action.

Viral hepatitis (A, B, C, D, E) represent a group of infectious diseases with long term hepatic and extrahepatic consequences that affect millions of individuals worldwide, most of them unaware about their status.

The World Hepatitis Day was established on July 28th by the 63rd WHO General Assembly, starting from 2010. The date commemorates the birthday of Samuel Baruch Blumberg, the American physician who discovered the hepatitis B virus in 1960s and later received the Nobel Prize for his work on the hepatitis B and its vaccine.

Goals of World Hepatitis Day

  1. Raise awareness regarding the five hepatitis viruses and how to avoid getting infected
  2. Promote information about effectiveness of vaccination against hepatitis A and B
  3. Encourage people to get testing
  4. Lift barriers in finding the hidden pool of infected people
  5. Fight the social stigma surrounding this subject

Why World Hepatitis Day is important?

  1. Viral hepatitis represents a global epidemic considering its prevalence and devastating consequences (liver cirrhosis, liver insufficiency and liver cancer)
  2. Tremendous progresses have been done in the field. Viral hepatitis can now be prevented and cured.
  3. There is a lot of work to do further in order to achieve the ambitious WHO goal of eliminating viral hepatitis as a public health threat by 2030.

World Hepatitis Day 2019

Each year the World Hepatitis Day has a different theme which reflects the current status of public health policy in the field of hepatitis and helps the people to build their campaigns. The theme of 2019 is

Find the missing millions!

and the reason behind this idea is that despite advances in therapy and massive scale-up in screening, diagnosis and linkage to care, 325 million people are still living with viral hepatitis worldwide and 290 million (9 in 10) are unaware of their HBV or HCV positive status.

Join the Romanian Association for Liver Diseases (Ro-ALD) and the Romanian Association of Patients with Hepatic Diseases (APAH-Ro) on July 28th 2019 in a dedicated event organized in Titan Park, Bucharest, giving you the opportunity of being tested and finding the missing infected individuals, receiving information on how to keep a healthy liver and offering support to those who are interested.

How to get involved in WHD2019?

Receive World Hepatitis Day updates straight to your inbox

Want to know more about how you can influence diagnosis and testing? Visit the "Find the missing millions" Advocacy Resource

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