TUESDAY, Oct. 1, 2002 (HealthDayNews) -- Indonesia has launched a national vaccination program to protect newborns against hepatitis B.
The goal of the program is to ensure that every baby is vaccinated against hepatitis B within their first seven days of life. That includes the 80 percent of Indonesian babies born at home rather than in hospitals. Indonesian midwives are being trained to give the vaccine as soon as a baby is born.
Normally, it took two months before Indonesian babies received their first hepatitis B vaccination. That put them at high risk for infection.
The highly infectious hepatitis B virus is transmitted almost 100 times more effectively than HIV/AIDS. Hepatitis B, which attacks the liver and is a major cause of liver cancer, kills more than 500,000 people each year worldwide.
Hepatitis B can cause acute infection in adults, but rarely proves fatal. But children are at high risk of developing life-threatening liver disease. Up to a quarter of children infected with hepatitis B in their first year of life eventually die as a result of the virus.
Infants infected during birth or shortly after often become chronic carriers of the hepatitis B virus and can infect other people. In some parts of Indonesia, as many as 70 percent of the people are infected with hepatitis B. It's estimated that 350 million people in the world carry the hepatitis B virus.
When correctly administered, hepatitis B vaccine is 95 percent effective.
The Indonesian vaccination program is a collaboration between the Indonesian government and the Children's Vaccine Program, part of the Seattle-based non-governmental organization, Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH).
More information
To learn more about viral hepatitis, go to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
