One in seven Filipinos has ‘hyperendemic’ hepatitis B
The Philippines needs to make more available testing for and vaccination against hepatitis B, a common blood-borne virus that usually leads to liver cancer, because the country remains “hyperendemic” for the disease, which means anyone who is unvaccinated is highly susceptible to infection.
In an online forum on Friday, Dr. Wendell Espinosa, vice president of Hepatology Society of the Philippines, said that one in seven Filipinos are afflicted with hepatitis B, the most common liver infection in the country and 67 percent of those with liver cancer are caused by hepatitis B.
Espinosa described hepatitis B as a “silent killer” because symptoms usually do not develop in a patient until the disease has reached an advanced stage.
“Addressing this is important because we still lack awareness about the disease, so we really need to advocate testing,” said Espinosa, a faculty member of University of St. La Salle’s College of Medicine in Bacolod City.
One of the reasons it is so common in the country, he added, is “because we haven’t maximized vaccination of hepatitis B.”
Espinosa pushed for the reduction of testing costs and the expansion of testing sites. Testing rates of Department of Health hospitals range from P250 to almost P1,000, as shown on their websites.
Hepatitis B is a vaccine-preventable disease, but he noted that inoculation has been on a decline since 2017, covering only about 50 to 70 percent of the population in 2020.
Hepatitis B is a viral infection that attacks the liver, causing it to be inflamed and damaged. About 90 percent of infected children globally develop chronic disease.
More than 500 Filipinos died of viral hepatitis from January to August 2022, according to Philippine Statistics Authority data.
