Viral hepatitis B and C affect as many as 500 million people globally. Of those, about 340 million are from the Asia-Pacific region - 10 times the number of people living with HIV worldwide.
Yet despite this devastating reach and the knowledge of the impact of these types of hepatitis for many decades, the global response to the disease lags far behind that of HIV. In the 30 years since the first reported Aids cases in 1981, advocacy and activism have been very successful in bringing about significant progress in prevention, control and treatment of HIV/Aids.
Leaders from the global hepatitis community recognise there are lessons to be learned from the Aids experience, and discussed this at a meeting in Taipei last month organised by the Coalition to Eradicate Viral Hepatitis in Asia-Pacific (Cevhap) and held at the 22nd Conference for the Asian Pacific Association for the Study of the Liver.
HIV expert, Professor David Thomas, director of the division of infectious diseases at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, delivered the keynote speech at the meeting, highlighting the following five lessons for the hepatitis community.
1. Treatment saves lives
In 1996, an effective combination of antiretroviral therapy (ART) drugs that delays the onset of Aids became available to those living with HIV in developed countries, cutting death rates of people with HIV/Aids in these countries by 84 per cent. But it wasn't until 2001, when the price of the drugs per patient fell from US$15,000 a year to US$295 - thanks to an Indian generic drug maker that sparked a price war - that developing countries had access to them.