Scientists are urgently trying to find the cause of the global outbreak of severe liver disease in young children. So far, adenovirus seems to be the best lead.
While COVID-19 hasn’t been ruled out as a potential cause, the leading contender is actually adenovirus, a common infection in children that can lead to hepatitis on rare occasions.
Nucleic acid vaccines use mRNA to give cells instructions on how to produce a desired protein.
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DNA and mRNA vaccines produce a different kind of immune response than traditional vaccines, allowing researchers to tackle some previously unsolvable problems in medicine.
New strategy helps build synthetic organs from scratch. This enabled the researchers to grow functioning liver tissue in the lab that could be transplanted into mice with liver disease.
Hepatitis C led to an estimated 400,000 deaths in 2016.
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Michael Houghton, an Edmonton-based virologist, was one of the recipients of this year’s Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine for the discovery of hepatitis C.
Sub-Saharan Africa has a low uptake of the Hepatitis B vaccine compared to the rest of the world.
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St. Patrick’s Day is typically a day of drinking and revelry, if not reverence for Ireland’s patron saint. In this year’s subdued celebration environment, a biochemist suggests thanking our livers.
Around 5% of adults and 90% of babies who contract hepatitis B go on to have life-long infection that can only be managed with regular medication.
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Organs from gay men or injecting drug users, often rejected for transplants, could safely be used, so long as donors test negative for infections such as HIV, and hepatitis B and C.
Hepatitis is a major public health burden.
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Many countries in sub-Saharan Africa have made vaccination and post-infection therapy available. But the number of those infected annually and dying from viral Hepatitis continues to be high.
Benjamin Cowie, The Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity and Nicole Romero, The Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity
Hepatitis A is a virus that infects the liver. Symptoms usually take 15-50 days to develop after initial infection and typically last for several weeks or sometimes longer.
Hepatitis is a public health concern globally.
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Women have evolved to have stronger immunity than men. But this comes with downsides -
women are more likely to have autoimmune diseases due to their “reactive” immune systems.
Tens of thousands of Australians have been cured of Hepatitis C since March 2016.
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Australia has been subsidising drugs to cure hepatitis C since March 2016. Unlike in many other countries, these are available to everyone with the disease and are much cheaper for our government.
Senior Research Associate, Cambridge Public Health; Associate Research Fellow, Cambridge Centre for Applied Research into Human Trafficking; Deputy Director, Intellectual Forum, Jesus College, University of Cambridge