The World Health Organization (WHO) Wednesday encouraged countries to boost testing and access to services and medicines for people in need as roughly 400 million people worldwide are infected with hepatitis B and C. "The world has ignored hepatitis at its peril," WHO Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan said ahead of World Hepatitis Day on July 28. "It is time to mobilize a global response to hepatitis on the scale similar to that generated to fight other communicable diseases like HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis." According to WHO, the number of people with hepatitis B and C is more than 10 times the number of people infected with HIV. Only about one in 20 people with viral hepatitis know that they have it and just one in 100 with the disease is being treated. "We need to act now to stop people from dying needlessly from hepatitis," said Dr. Gottfried Hirnschall, WHO director of the HIV department and global hepatitis program. There is a vaccine and treatment for hepatitis B, but not for hepatitis C. Some countries are working to curb the rate of infection of the virus by lowering the prices of hepatitis C medicines, such as in Egypt, where the price of medicines fell from $900 in 2014 to $200 in 2016 as a result of access to generic drugs. WHO says that Brazil and Pakistan also are expanding treatment coverage, and Georgia plans to eliminate the disease entirely.
