Skip to main content

Tales of Hepatitis B

Image
By
Hepatitis B, a viral infection of the liver, has its mixed bag of stories – some of them are good while others are tragic. Here are some lessons from a single family.

Happy tale 1: If diagnosed on time, you can keep your liver healthy, protecting it from damage.
Anoop, a 36 year old software engineer working with a multinational company who was diagnosed to have this infection 6 years ago during a blood screening drive, visited me last week. His recent blood reports were perfect: the liver functions were absolutely normal and his fibroscan showed that his liver was as soft and supple as any healthy person’s. He was of course on a daily oral tablet costing a mere Rs 800 per month, all these years, but there was no trace of any live virus in his blood. When he asked me how long he expected to live, I could not suppress a laugh. “As long as elderly people do in India” I answered.

Happy tale 2: You can prevent getting infected by a very effective and affordable vaccine.
His wife and child had tested negative for Hepatitis B on blood screening tests and Anoop, on the recommendation of a doctor, had get them to take 3 shots of the Hepatitis B vaccine. Their recent blood tests had shown high titres of protective antibodies. His face lit us when I told him that they were well protected for the rest of their lives from at least one potentially serious disease, ie Hepatitis B. And could he plan to have another child with the assurance that the infection will not spread to the new born? He had the green signal.
The earlier concern of high cost is now history. What used to cost Rs 500 for each shot now costs Rs 50 or less. It means you can get a life time of protection with three doses for as little as Rs 150!

Tragic tale : Although Anoop was happy with his reports and those of his wife and child, he still finds it impossible to erase the memories of his father’s illness and death. They had taken him to a hospital for swelling of feet, pain and distention of abdomen, where his blood tests and ultrasound had showed a shrunken cirrhotic liver with a large cancer in it. The cause, th
e doctor had explained, was Hepatitis B infection that had been going on for years, but had not been detected in time.
His end had been agonising: he had become bed-ridden, groaning with pain most of the time. He had required repeated admissions to hospital for tapping of fluid from the abdomen and infusion of expensive medicines. Towards the end, he would lapse intermittently into coma. Finally he had vomited of a large amount of blood, a spectacle that haunts the family to this date.

World Hepatitis Day, celebrated on 28th July, is round the corner. It is an occasion when hospitals and NGOs set up camps and offer free testing and vaccination for Hepatitis B. Get yourself and your loved ones tested and vaccinated this year.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Doctor’s Dress

By
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...
2 comments
Read more

Food Fads in Liver Disorders

By
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...
2 comments
Read more

Questions from a Doctor’s Life

By
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...
1 comment
Read more