As vertical transmission of the hepatitis B virus (HBV) from mother to child is the main transmission route for the virus in Taiwan, the Taiwan Children Liver Foundation urged mothers with HBV to have their babies vaccinated against HBV and to receive the Human Hepatitis B Immunoglobulin injection if necessary.
World Hepatitis Day will be next Sunday, the foundation said, and to promote this year’s theme “This is hepatitis. Know it. Confront it,” the foundation is to hold seven free lectures for mothers with HBV next month.
Wen Wan-hsin (文萬欣), an attending physician in pediatric gastroenterology at Cardinal Tien Hospital, said HBV infection can be acute or chronic.
“Acute cases are those who were infected, but then generated antibodies. Chronic cases involve those who remain infected, or hepatitis B surface antigen positive, for more than six months after exposure to the virus and become carriers of the virus,” Wen said.
Fifteen to 40 percent of chronically infected individuals develop chronic inflammatory liver diseases, cirrhosis of the liver or liver cancer at some point in their life and, more importantly, “90 percent of infants infected at birth suffer from chronic HBV infection,” Wen added.
The prevalence of chronic HBV infection among children and teenagers in Taiwan was once as high as 10 to 20 percent, Wen said, but the rate had decreased drastically to less than 1 percent after the implementation of universal infant hepatitis B vaccinations in 1986.
Vertical transmission from mother to child is therefore the main route of HBV infection in present-day Taiwan.
Attending physician in pediatrics at National Taiwan University Hospital Chen Huey-ling (陳慧玲) advised all pregnant women to be screened for hepatitis B surface antigen, the presence of which indicates HBV infection, and hepatitis B extracellular (HBeAg) antigen, a protein from HBV that circulates in infected blood when the virus is replicating and multiplying.
Research conducted by National Taiwan University Hospital, Cardinal Tien Hospital and Tzu Chi General Hospital has found that 80.2 percent of the HBeAg-positive mothers have high viral load, which is significantly correlated with mother-to-infant transmission, compared to the 0.5 percent of the HBeAg-negative mothers.
So if the mother is HBeAg positive, the baby is highly susceptible to HBV infection, Chen said.
“These babies will need to receive hepatitis B immunoglobulin injections within 24 hours of birth, in addition to three doses of the hepatitis B vaccine administered according to the vaccination schedule,” he added.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods