Barbers Join the Hepatitis Prevention Drive

Do you always make sure if your barber or beautician is using a fresh new blade each time you go to the salon or parlour for your hair-cut, pedicure or waxing,?
Shaving or piercing of the body with re-used sharp instruments help Hepatitis B and C viruses to spread from one host to another and maintain their unrelenting presence in the community.
Pamela Anderson, the Hollywood actress of ‘Bay watch’ fame became the most famous international poster girl for Hepatitis C when she contracted the infection from her then-boyfriend by sharing a needle for a tattoo.
These viruses are normally present in body secretions, serum or blood of infected individuals and are highly infective. Up to a million of these viruses could be present on a needle tip.
Skin piercing allows small amounts of serum to come in contact with the needle. If the needle is not cleaned properly and re-used in another person, there is a high chance of transmitting an infection such as hepatitis B from an infected person to a new host.

A family of 3 brothers was shocked and surprised when they had tested positive for Hepatitis B during a free screening camp last year. After delving deep into their history for possible sources of infection, we discovered that the three had visited a village fair together and got tattooed at the same stall with the same needle on that occasion.
What has intrigued medical scientists is how the hepatitis B and C viruses keep spreading in the community and maintain their prevalence of 4%. Most of those who test positive, do not have history of blood transfusion or surgery, suggesting that some other route must be at play. The missing link in the puzzle could be the re-used blades and needles that barbers and beauticians use.
HOPE Initiative kicked off a unique campaign last week by inviting 90 barbers to a seminar and discussing with them how some of their practices could be inadvertently spreading these viral infections to their clients. They took surprisingly keen interest in learning about these bugs and seemed quite willing to use fresh new blades for each client.
The challenge now is to reach out to all barbers in the country and encourage them to modify their practice, and on clients such as you to insist that your barber or beautician uses new sharps each time when you visit them.

Comments

The Doctor’s Dress

The familiar white coat worn by physicians as their distinctive dress for over 100 years, has started generating murmurs of controversy. It is not uncommon to find the blood pressure to be higher when measured by a white-coat-wearing-doctor in the hospital or clinic than the readings obtained at home by relatives. This is due to the anxiety that the white coat and the hospital setting evokes in patients, and has been termed “White Coat Hypertension”. Mature clinicians often routinely subtract a few points from these measurements when entering records in case charts or calculating the dose of anti-hypertensive medications to be prescribed. The white coat scares children too. Kids often express their dislike for this dress by crying and screaming and by denying access to their bellies or chest for examination by paediatricians in this attire. Many pediatricians across the world have folded up their white coats and taken to informal colourful dressing to...

Food Fads in Liver Disorders

In an attempt at trying to do well to those they love, spouses and parents often enforce diets on patients of liver diseases that often turn out to be detrimental. The commonest food fad is pale insipid boiled cabbage being doled out to nauseous patients suffering from hepatitis that makes them puke even more. The liver, in a way, is a buzzing manufacturing unit that requires lots of energy to keep its multiple functions going. And it derives all this from the food we eat. During disease, such as during an attack of jaundice, when many of the liver cells get killed, the liver attemptsdamage control by trying to regenerate quickly. For its cells to multiply however, it requires a generous supply of energy that comes from carbohydrates, and protein, the building block for its cells and tissues. Boiled green vegetables unfortunately have neither of these. Hence the situation often progresses to that of a starved liver unable to recuperate due to cut-off food suppl...

Questions from a Doctor’s Life

There is hardly any person in Uttar Pradesh who has not heard of Dr D K Chhabra, a senior neurosurgeon, who died recently. Over the decades his expertise, pragmatic advice and popularity had broken the shackles of his narrow surgical field coming to be known as a “brain-specialist”and a genuine adviser for all health problems. I got to know him in 1987 when I joined the upcoming Sanjay Gandhi PG Institute of Medical Sciences (SGPGI) in Lucknow as a young member of the faculty in Gastroenterology. He had moved from his alma mater the KG Medical College where he is still regarded as a legend. An omnipresent bachelor doctor living in the duty room readily available to help anybody anytime.He was tasked to heading and developing Neurosciences at SGPGI. He had an eye for detail and was tasked additionally by the director to set up not just his department, but the whole hospital, the building, equipment and the campus. DKC was a tall and handsome man who spoke little. But when he did inl...

Health Adda

Search This Blog