Policies & Research

Elimination –Urgent Global Action Needed

Urgent scale-up of global action is needed if the world is to meet its target of eliminating viral hepatitis by 2030. This was the clear message from the World Health…

Point-of-Care Testing: The future of hep B care

Hepatitis SA has long championed the power if point-of-care testing (POCT). It means that a simple fingerstick blood test can be used to quickly and accurately be used to determine…

Hepatitis B in Europe: A Persistent Problem

Chronic hepatitis B is substantially prevalent across Europe, affecting an estimated 0.7 per cent of the population in the region in 2022, according to a new study published in Eurosurveillance. While this…

Systemic Failure: How Prisons Fail People who Inject Drugs and the Community

One in nine people in prisons globally have a history of injecting drug use and their risk of HIV, viral hepatitis and tuberculosis is up to 45 times higher than…

Stopping Hepatitis E

A drug that is already in clinical trials against the hepatitis C virus (HCV) has been shown to be excellent at also preventing the hepatitis E virus (HEV) from replicating.…

New Australian Hepatitis Strategies Released

Australia has taken a significant step in its commitment to ending hepatitis B and C as public health challenges, with the launch of the Fourth National Hepatitis B Strategy 2025–2030 and…

Can the Hepatitis B Virus’s Genetic Diversity Predict its Curability?

Scientists at Melbourne’s Doherty Institute are asking, “What if there was a way to predict which patients are more likely to achieve functional cure of chronic hepatitis B virus infection?”…

How Hepatitis B Became a Political Football

The illness and the damage in lives that will come from abandoning the hepatitis B birth dose vaccine is hard to overstate.

Hepatitis D Basics

There are five main hepatitis viruses, helpfully named A, B, C, D and E. The hepatitis D virus (HDV)—sometimes known as hepatitis delta—is relatively little-known because it can only live…

Intertwined: Harm Reduction and BBV Prevention

Harm reduction and blood-borne virus prevention are inextricably linked. We can’t have the second without the first. To that end, Hepatitis SA – South Australia’s hepatitis peak body – has…

Closing the Gap in Practice

A widely-acclaimed community-led Northern Territory health program which closed the gap for hepatitis B is calling for ongoing support for screening, treatment pathways and workforce capacity building, so that hard-earned…

Could New Hepatitis B Drug – Bepirovirsen – Offer a Higher Functional Cure Rate?

At the start of January, pharmaceutical company GSK announced positive results from its two phase-III trials for bepirovirsen, a potential first-in-class treatment for chronic hepatitis B. They claim that bepirovirsen…

‘Shared decision-making’ for childhood vaccines sounds empowering – but it may mean less access for families already stretched thin

Shared decision-making is an approach doctors use when there’s genuinely more than one reasonable choice and the answer depends on what matters most and feels right to the patient.

Curing Hepatitis C Reduces Strain on the Immune System of HIV Patients

Fighting two infections at once puts an extra-heavy burden on the immune system. In Australia for example, a number of older people with haemophilia live with both hepatitis C and…