A Journey of Discovery in Hepatitis B and C

About My Journey

My name is Raquel and over the next 12 months I will be travelling around the world on behalf of the World Hepatitis Alliance. As part of my tour, I will be meeting with patients, medical associations, patient groups and politicians to gain a better understanding of how countries are tackling hepatitis B and C and to share best practice from other countries...

Who am I? Well, 3½ years ago I knocked on a charity's door in London to ask if I could interview some people for my masters thesis on hepatitis. Since then I have turned a personal interest into my daily working life and have never left the hepatitis field. I have always been passionate about hepatitis – I lost someone I loved dearly to hepatitis C when I was 15 and have seen many other people needlessly suffer from hepatitis C and B through my charity work in this field.

Knowing that treatments for hepatitis C can be very effective if patients are diagnosed early and that there is a vaccine to prevent hepatitis B motivates me to continue raising awareness of these diseases which collectively affect 500 million people in the world and take 1.5 million lives a year.

I hope my journey helps bring change for the hepatitis community and that people benefit from it as a consequence. Welcome to my blog: keep up to date with my journey here!

Where will I be visiting?

On behalf of the World Hepatitis Alliance, I will be visiting the following countries to learn about how governments, patient advocacy groups and the medical community are tackling chronic hepatitis B and C:

  • Argentina
  • Australia
  • Bangladesh
  • Brazil
  • China (including Hong Kong and Taiwan)
  • Ghana
  • Poland
  • New Zealand
  • Scotland
  • USA
  • Vietnam

Blogging Together

Blogging together is an opportunity for bloggers, vloggers, and photo-bloggers to support the 'Am I Number 12?' campaign. Add a badge and show your support for the 500 million people living with hepatitis B and C today.

Alternatively if you want to make your own badge, send it to us and we will include it in our gallery of badges: worldhepday@fleishman.com

Join me and support worldhepatitisday.org

The Gulf gets involved with World Hepatitis Day

07/ 6/09 by: Raquel Jose

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Another country which participated in World Hepatitis Day this year was Kuwait (cool, huh?).

To mark WHD, 'The National Alliance Against Hepatitis C' hosted a very successful meeting with the Ministry of Health on May 25th to discuss what actions were needed to combat hepatitis in the country. As a result, Kuwait is the second country, following Scotland, to officially sign up to the '12 Asks', after the government announced that it will support six of the '12 Asks' proposed (Hooray!) It is indeed excellent progress to have the Kuwait government on board and supporting local initiatives such as surveillance and public education campaigns.

The meeting was attended by more than 200 people including prominent doctors, laboratory technicians, public health and occupational health employees and government health officials. In addition, delegates from neighbouring countries also attended. Media coverage was widespread, and many national daily newspapers covered the meeting (interestingly in Arabic AND English) and the 'Am I Number 12?' campaign.

Way to go Kuwait!

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