Re: Weird hepatitis B test results

On Aug 19, 7:49 pm, ri...@xxxxxxxxx (Rich Wales) wrote:
No likely family member comes to my mind, unfortunately. I can't be
100% sure of the health of all the roommates I've ever had, but none
of them were known at the time I lived with them to have hepatitis B
or be a carrier thereof.

Most cases are anicteric and people don't realize they have it.
Chronic carriers do not know they carry the virus and they do not have
hepatitis and therefore not really sick. Most people are unaware of it
unless they suffer from an obvious icteric case.


I donated blood several times during the 1970's and early 1980's,
and I was never told during that time that my blood had failed any
screening tests. So, if I was in fact exposed to HBV, I assume it
would have to have been sometime between the early 1980's and 2001
(a period of time during which I just never got around to giving
blood, as best I can recall). That rules out childhood exposure.

The early years involved only testing for hepatitis B antigen known at
that time as the Australian antigen because of it's original isolation
from Australian aborigines. The 1970's involved testing for this
antigen and the use of surrogate testing such as liver enzymes in
ruling out actual hepatitis cases known as non-A, non-B hepatitis.
They employed primitive technologies that worked OK but very limited
in testing menus that certainly did not include the panel you cited.
All they checked for was for active hepatitis cases. The transfusion
related hepatitis was very high back then compared to today.

A revolution that took place occurred in the 1990s with the
incorporation of monoclonal antibody technology. This provided
sensitivity of radio-immnoassays but without the radiation hazard. PCR
technology also became more prevalent.

> Prenatal hepatitis B antigen testing is mandatory and therefore
> your spouse would not be such a candidate for chronic carrier
> state . . . .

Just to be sure here, was such testing being done in the early 1990's
(when our children were born), and both in the US and Canada?

Testing was done in the 1990's in the states and probably in Canada as
well. The vaccine was developed in the 1980s if I remember correctly.
Universal vaccination was instituted in 1991.

Here's a quote about the importance of vaccination.

"The prevalence of HBV carriers varies from 0.1 percent to 2 percent
in low prevalence areas (United States and Canada, Western Europe,
Australia and New Zealand), to 3 to 5 percent in intermediate
prevalence areas (Mediterranean countries, Japan, Central Asia, Middle
East, and Latin and South America), to 10 to 20 percent in high
prevalence areas (southeast Asia, China, sub-Saharan Africa)


"The wide range in HBV carrier rate in different parts of the world is
largely related to differences in the age at infection, which is
inversely related to the risk of chronicity. The rate of progression
from acute to chronic HBV infection is approximately 90 percent for
perinatally acquired infection [4], 20 to 50 percent for infections
between the age of 1 and 5 years [5,6], and less than 5 percent for
adult acquired infection [7]."

Stay clear of hepatitis C as there is no vaccine for it and it's in
epidemic proportions.



.

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