[8] That increase has occurred despite a vaccination program for newborn babies since the 1990s, which showed good effectiveness for reducing chronic HBV infection in children.
By 2006, China has successfully immunised 11.1 million children living in the country's poorest provinces against hepatitis B according to the Chinese health ministry, and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI).
Achieving long-term success will require "assuring no new financial barriers arise", said Julian Lob-Levyt, Executive Secretary of the GAVI Alliance.
"This is one of the greatest challenges and the solution lies not just within China but with a global community mobilized to ensure access to vaccine financing for all developing nations."
Home to a large population of ethnic minorities of low socioeconomic status, the Qinghai province is a remote, often neglected, rural region of China with a high prevalence of chronic hepatitis B.
Using the existing provincial China CDC structure, this private-public partnership in Qinghai resulted in a unique two-part school-based immunization program to educate and provide free Hep B vaccination for all children in kindergarten and grade school within the region.
Because a high load of HBV in patients is the main cause of hepatitis progression, the ultimate goal in treatment is to eradicate the virus before irreversible liver damage occurs.
[14] Some traditional Chinese herbs, such as kushenin (Sophora flavescens) and some complex prescriptions, have some efficacy as antivirals and in the protection of liver function, although the specific mechanism and components need to be identified.
The medicine was developed jointly by Novartis and U.S. biotech firm Idenix Pharmaceuticals Inc and has been shown in trials to produce significantly greater viral suppression compared to the commonly used treatment lamivudine.
But a study of some campaigns shows that more than 1 million Chinese babies born each year in the area covered by the government initiated programs are not receiving the vaccination.
Officials involved in the hepatitis B vaccination programs say that in many of China's poverty-stricken rural areas, children are delivered at home in remote mountain villages or nomadic herders' tents, far from hospitals and access to medical information.
One major problem facing Chinese people infected with hepatitis B is that illegal blood testing is required by most employers in China.
Hepatitis B and its related disorders are important public health issues in China, which not only presents challenges for doctors and scientists but also increases the burden for the government.
[16][17] Research will include: large retrospective and prospective studies of the population vaccinated against hepatitis B and the incidence of HCC; genetic variation in HBV and its subtypes, and mutations in HBV DNA in the response to interferon and nucleotide analogues; host-gene variation and the therapeutic response, including single-nuclear polymorphisms and gene copy-number variations; virus mutation and the mechanism of the immune response in fulminant liver failure, and the immunological factors which cause liver injury and the markers which predict reduction in liver function; assessment and prediction of liver fibrosis by non-invasive biomarkers, and interference with fibrosis from small chemical compounds or traditional Chinese medicines; prediction of the development, metastasis, and prognosis of HCC by molecular typing; and the identification of important signal transduction pathways in HCC and the development of new small chemical compounds to target HCC.
The goals include: completion of the immunoprophylaxis strategy, such as HBV vaccine, to decrease the incidence of HCC by more than 10%; identification of molecular biomarkers, and the creation of molecular-typing diagnostic kits for the prediction of the therapeutic response; the development of regimens to treat HBV; the identification of biomarkers to predict the aggressiveness of severe hepatitis B and the development of a kit for early diagnosis of liver cirrhosis; the identification of markers (biological and genomic, and small molecules) for early diagnosis and to predict recurrence and metastasis, and the development of new drugs for HCC, to increase the rate of early diagnosis by more than 20% and 5-year survival by more than 5%.
The largest problem facing Chinese people infected with HBV is that illegal blood testing is required by most employers in China.