World Hepatitis Day 2015: Prevent hepatitis. Act now.

World Hepatitis Day, 28 July 2015 - On World Hepatitis Day, 28 July 2015, the World Health Organization (WHO) and its partners are highlighting the urgent need for countries to enhance their actions to prevent viral hepatitis infection and to ensure that people who have been infected are diagnosed and offered treatment. This year the WHO is focusing particularly on hepatitis B and C, which together cause approximately 80% of all liver cancer deaths and kill close to 1.4 million people every year, ranking as the world's eighth biggest killer.

For more information about prevention of cancer through vaccination, please download the UICC and GAVI, The Vaccine Alliance joint Backgrounder “Revolutionising Cancer Prevention with Vaccines”.

Key messages of the World Hepatitis Day 2015 campaign “Prevent hepatitis. Act now.”

• Know the risks
  Unsafe blood, unsafe injections, and sharing drug-injection equipment can all result in hepatitis infection.
• Demand safe injections
  2 million people a year contract hepatitis from unsafe injections. Using sterile, single-use syringes can prevent these infections
• Vaccinate children
  Approximately 780,000 persons die each year from hepatitis B infection. A safe and effective vaccine can protect from hepatitis B infection for life.
• Get tested, seek treatment
  Effective medicines exist to treat hepatitis B and cure hepatitis C.

For World Hepatitis Day 2015, the World Hepatitis Alliance launched a new campaign, named “4,000 Voices”, to create better awareness and understanding of how every day 4,000 people around the world will needlessly die from viral hepatitis, an almost entirely preventable disease. By using the hashtag #4000Voices and signing-up to the World Hepatitis Day Thunderclap, people are being encouraged to contribute their voice to help raise awareness around the prevention of hepatitis. Each tweet that includes the campaign hashtag will plot the users public profile picture onto a mosaic map to visually represent the scale of the problem.

For more information about Hepatitis visit the WHO website.
For more information about the 2015 campaign, visit the World Hepatitis Day website.