Friday, September 30, 2022

Poignantly sad

This is so poignantly sad! I met a patient from Africa with liver failure due to hepatitis, and the gastroenterologist said that community-wide vaccination efforts against schistosomiasis, a chronic infection common in Africa, are often not supplied with enough needles, so they are reused and then hepatitis (if one patient has it) is spread to hundreds of people. (So they gain protection from lifelong bleeding disease but trade that in for a lethal liver failure.) 

"Transmission of the virus may also occur through the reuse of contaminated or poorly sterilized needles" https://www.afro.who.int/health-topics/hepatitis

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