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21/11/2007
Immigrants Fuel Soaring UK Hepatitis Levels
Immigrants into the UK are helping to raise levels of a dangerous – potentially fatal – infection across the country.
Soaring rates of infection by hepatitis B, said to be fuelled by large-scale immigration, now poses a serious health threat that is not being addressed properly, a report has said.
The Hepatitis B Foundation estimates that the numbers infected by the disease in Britain have almost doubled in the past five years, to 326,000. More than half of these people are immigrants from Africa, Asia, Russia and the new EU nations.
Hepatitis B has few symptoms. If untreated it can lead to serious liver disease including liver cancer, and death, decades after infection.
Worldwide, 500,000 to 700,000 people die every year as a result of infection by the virus.
Britain, unlike 85% of countries, does not have the universal vaccination against hepatitis B that is recommended by the World Health Organisation.
Instead, the policy is to vaccinate selectively, attempting to prevent the spread of the disease from mothers to children, for example.
The report cautions that growing levels of undetected infections are a health time bomb that needs to be defused urgently.
It calls on the Government to develop a strategy for dealing with the problem.
“Much more needs to be done,” the report said. “There is a serious risk that in the future, while chronic hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection declines in countries which have implemented universal vaccination, the UK – that great pioneer of public health – will continue to harbour an ever-increasing pool of chronic HBV infection.”
Damian Green, the Conservative immigration spokesman, said: “This is an alarming report and it is reasonable to expect from the Government an urgent response about testing those people coming into the country.”
Hepatitis B is transmitted in many of the same ways as HIV – through sex, shared needles, blood, from mother to baby at birth, or from person to person by contact with skin grazes.
The difference is that hepatitis B is 10 times as easy to transmit as HIV.
(BMcC)
Soaring rates of infection by hepatitis B, said to be fuelled by large-scale immigration, now poses a serious health threat that is not being addressed properly, a report has said.
The Hepatitis B Foundation estimates that the numbers infected by the disease in Britain have almost doubled in the past five years, to 326,000. More than half of these people are immigrants from Africa, Asia, Russia and the new EU nations.
Hepatitis B has few symptoms. If untreated it can lead to serious liver disease including liver cancer, and death, decades after infection.
Worldwide, 500,000 to 700,000 people die every year as a result of infection by the virus.
Britain, unlike 85% of countries, does not have the universal vaccination against hepatitis B that is recommended by the World Health Organisation.
Instead, the policy is to vaccinate selectively, attempting to prevent the spread of the disease from mothers to children, for example.
The report cautions that growing levels of undetected infections are a health time bomb that needs to be defused urgently.
It calls on the Government to develop a strategy for dealing with the problem.
“Much more needs to be done,” the report said. “There is a serious risk that in the future, while chronic hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection declines in countries which have implemented universal vaccination, the UK – that great pioneer of public health – will continue to harbour an ever-increasing pool of chronic HBV infection.”
Damian Green, the Conservative immigration spokesman, said: “This is an alarming report and it is reasonable to expect from the Government an urgent response about testing those people coming into the country.”
Hepatitis B is transmitted in many of the same ways as HIV – through sex, shared needles, blood, from mother to baby at birth, or from person to person by contact with skin grazes.
The difference is that hepatitis B is 10 times as easy to transmit as HIV.
(BMcC)
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