The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine is planning to make the U.S. government pay for the vaccination needed to get rid of Hepatitis B and hepatitis C all in all in the U.S. by 2030. They wanted to completely get rid of the viral disease as it kills more and more people.
There are about 20,000 Americans per year that are killed by hepatitis B and hepatitis C because it becomes liver cancer. The viral disease has long been a problem not only in the U.S. but also in the world. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has laid out a plan and it will be successful once the U.S. government agrees to it. They wanted the federal government to buy the rights of the expensive new medicine to the disease.
However, the budget to Hepatitis B and hepatitis C are less than other diseases. It only accounts for less than 1 percent of the National Institutes of Health research budget, Laboratory reported. "Viral hepatitis is simply not a sufficient priority in the United States," said Brian Strom, chair of the committee that carried out the study and chancellor and university professor, Rutgers Biomedical and Sciences, Rutgers University, Newark, N.J. There are about 1.3 million people in the U.S. that have the infectious disease. There are also about 2.7 million people in the U.S. with Hepatitis C.
Hepatitis B and C can lead to liver cancer. When combined, both types of hepatitis total to 80 percent of liver cancer cases worldwide, L.A. Times stated. It is "the seventh leading cause of death in the world - and killing more people every year than HIV, road traffic accidents, or diabetes", said Brian Strom. Liver cancer is on the rise every year in the U.S. It has increased by 38 percent just between 2003 and 2012, while the deaths increased by 56 percent.
All of those are because of Hepatitis C and B. Actually, Hepatitis is curable, especially Hepatitis B. It has a vaccine to prevent people from getting it. If the government really wants to get rid of the viral disease it needs to approve the project that the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine is proposing.
