Policies & Research

The over‑50s are most likely to overdose. Here’s how older people use drugs

Latest figures from the Pennington Institute show that older Australians make up the highest proportion of unintentional overdose deaths.

Australia’s Deadliest Year of Drug Overdoses

New data from the Penington Institute has revealed that 2,272 Australians died of drug-induced deaths in 2023, with the rate of unintentional overdoses increasing to nearly 80 per cent. On average,…

Results on New Hep B Drug: How good is it?

Pharmaceutical giant, GSK, who seem to be leading the field in developing a hepatitis B functional cure, has finally presented the results on their new drug, bepirovirsen. The 254 million…

4474 Lives Saved, But Targets Will Not Be Met

Powerful new data from the 2024 annual report for Measuring the progress towards the targets of the National Hepatitis B Strategy (launched by The Peter Doherty Institute at the end…

In Our Library: May 2026 Highlights

The national hepatitis strategies, Viral Hepatitis Mapping Project reports, and more… Click on the images to access, or view all resources added in the last month Sixth national hepatitis C strategy 2025…

China Deal on Potential Hep B Cure

Pharmaceutical giant GSK has announced that it has entered into an exclusive collaboration with the Hong Kong-based pharma company Sino Biopharmaceutical to sell in mainland China, a chronic ​hepatitis B…

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

A clinical trial led by the Kirby Institute at UNSW Sydney has found that point-of-care testing for hepatitis B DNA is as effective as traditional laboratory testing, paving the way…

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.