Break down hepatitis barriers
On Monday, July 28, Ghana joined the global community to commemorate World Hepatitis Day 2025.
This year’s theme, "Hepatitis: Let's Break It Down", resonates deeply.
The theme underscores the urgent need to dismantle financial, social and systemic barriers that hinder hepatitis elimination and liver cancer prevention efforts.
Viral hepatitis is an inflammation of the liver that causes severe liver disease and liver cancer. “The theme emphasises the need to simplify, scale up and integrate hepatitis services – vaccination, safe injection practices, harm reduction and especially testing and treatment – into national health systems.,” says the World Health Organisation (WHO).
In 2022, 304 million people were living with chronic hepatitis B and C while 1.3 million people died of chronic hepatitis B and C.
In Ghana, nine per cent of the population were living with chronic hepatitis B and 2.3 per cent with hepatitis C.
According to the Ghana Health Service (GHS), 15,000 Ghanaians lost their lives to chronic hepatitis B and C-related liver diseases in 2022.
These numbers highlight the significance of raising awareness, promoting testing and ensuring access to treatment.
The full scale of the hepatitis burden in the country is not clear due to low testing capacity and inadequate reporting systems.
There are many Ghanaians who do not know their hepatitis status, which complicates treatment efforts.
It is estimated that eight per cent of newborns are born to mothers with hepatitis B.
Without intervention, a large majority of these infants, around 95 per cent, are at high risk of developing chronic hepatitis B infections.
This points to the critical need for hepatitis B vaccination and immunoglobulin administration at birth for infants born to infected mothers to prevent chronic infection.
The Daily Graphic, therefore, urges the government, healthcare providers, civil society and the media to work together to increase awareness of hepatitis and promote prevention through public education campaigns.
It is essential to let the public know that hepatitis B and C can be detected through screening, and treatment can prevent severe liver disease and liver cancer.
According to WHO, chronic hepatitis B and C silently cause liver damage and cancer – despite being preventable, treatable, and, in the case of hepatitis C, curable.
Public education campaigns can help reduce stigma and promote understanding of hepatitis, encouraging people to take preventive measures and those affected to seek help.
To effectively combat hepatitis, we urge the government to focus on expanding vaccination programmes and ensure that all newborns receive the hepatitis B vaccine at birth dose, which prevents mother-to-child transmission.
There is the need to make hepatitis testing accessible, especially in deprived communities, and provide lifesaving antivirals to those in need, regardless of economic status.
We applaud initiatives like that of the Mega Lifesciences Ghana Limited, in collaboration with the Ghana Association for the Study of Liver and Digestive Diseases (GASLIDD), which launched a nationwide initiative to screen 19,000 Ghanaians for Hepatitis B and C free of charge to mark this year’s Hepatitis Day.
This effort aims to expand access to diagnosis and early intervention.
At a ceremony to commemorate this year’s World Hepatitis Day celebration in Accra, the Minister of Health, Kwabena Mintah Akandoh, said that GHS would soon re-launch a Ghana Liver Hepatitis Fund to complement government funds to support primary health care as a way of sustaining domestic financing mechanism.
Furthermore, at the ceremony a representative of WHO, Dr Fiona Braka, indicated that Ghana would be introducing the hepatitis B at birth dose, and that they were working with the GHS to scale up access to testing and antiviral treatment resource mobilisation for the recently developed national strategic plan.
This is indeed good news and we are hopeful that the government and all other stakeholders will make testing, vaccination and treatment easier and more available for everyone, everywhere.
