WHO World Hepatitis Day
<p>In 1967, a geneticist named Baruch Blumberg, working at what is now the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, identified a protein in the blood of an Australian Aboriginal man that turned out to be the surface marker of the hepatitis B virus. From that discovery came a blood test to detect the virus and, by 1969, the first hepatitis B vaccine. Blumberg won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1976 for the work. He was born on 28 July, and that is why World Hepatitis Day, the global awareness day for viral hepatitis, falls on 28 July each year.</p>
<h2 id="where-the-day-comes-from">Where the day comes from</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
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<p>The date was not always fixed there. The first community-led World Hepatitis Day was held in 2008, organised by the World Hepatitis Alliance, a patient-led body founded in 2007. Earlier awareness efforts had used other dates. The decisive step came in May 2010, when the Sixty-third World Health Assembly adopted resolution WHA63.18 on viral hepatitis, the first such resolution in the WHO’s history, and formally designated 28 July as World Hepatitis Day. The choice of Blumberg’s birthday gave the observance both symbolic and scientific weight: it honours the man whose work made prevention of hepatitis B possible in the first place.</p>
<p>That WHO endorsement mattered because viral hepatitis had long been a neglected problem, overshadowed by diseases with louder constituencies. Putting the day in the official calendar of nearly two hundred member states was a way of insisting that a quiet, slow-moving epidemic deserved the same coordinated attention as the dramatic ones.</p>
<h2 id="a-history-of-a-hidden-disease">A history of a hidden disease</h2>
<p>“Hepatitis” simply means inflammation of the liver, and the viral forms are caused by five distinct viruses, labelled A through E. They behave very differently. Hepatitis A and E spread mainly through contaminated food and water and usually cause short-lived illness. Hepatitis B, C and D can become chronic, silently scarring the liver over decades and leading to cirrhosis and liver cancer. Together, hepatitis B and C account for the overwhelming share of the disease’s toll, and the WHO has estimated that viral hepatitis kills well over a million people a year, a figure comparable to that of tuberculosis or malaria, yet far less widely recognised.</p>
<p>Blumberg’s discovery in 1967 broke the field open. Before it, the viruses were largely a mystery; afterward, hepatitis B could be screened for in donated blood, vaccinated against, and tracked. The blood test alone transformed transfusion safety, sharply cutting the number of people who caught hepatitis from donated blood, and the vaccine that followed in 1969 became, over time, one of the most widely administered in the world; it is now given routinely to infants in most countries. The story advanced again in 1989, when the hepatitis C virus was identified by Michael Houghton, Qui-Lim Choo, George Kuo and Daniel Bradley, work that eventually won Houghton, along with Harvey Alter and Charles Rice, a share of the 2020 Nobel Prize and that opened the way to the direct-acting antiviral drugs which can now cure most hepatitis C infections in a matter of weeks. Within a single human lifetime, then, hepatitis B and C went from unknown agents to diseases that could be prevented, detected and, in the case of C, cured outright, a pace of progress that few areas of medicine can match.</p>
<h2 id="why-it-matters">Why it matters</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
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<p>A great deal of viral hepatitis goes undiagnosed because it can persist for years without symptoms, which is precisely why a dedicated day is useful. Many people carrying hepatitis B or C have no idea, and that ignorance leads to late diagnosis, onward transmission and avoidable liver disease. The day exists to close that gap, to push for testing, to promote the hepatitis B vaccine, and to keep pressure on governments and funders to treat the disease as the major threat it is.</p>
<p>There is a campaigning logic to the date as well. By giving the global response a fixed annual focus, the WHO and the World Hepatitis Alliance can rally health ministries, clinicians and patient groups around a single message and measure progress year on year. The same coordinating principle runs through the WHO’s wider calendar of health observances, from the founding-anniversary focus of <a href="/specialdate/who-world-health-day/">World Health Day</a> to the mental-wellbeing campaigns of <a href="/specialdate/who-world-mental-health-day/">World Mental Health Day</a> and the anti-malaria drive of <a href="/specialdate/who-world-malaria-day/">World Malaria Day</a>.</p>
<h2 id="the-goal-of-elimination">The goal of elimination</h2>
<p>What sets viral hepatitis apart from many other major killers is that the tools to defeat it largely already exist. There is a safe, effective vaccine against hepatitis B; there are drugs that cure most cases of hepatitis C; and the routes of transmission, unsafe injections, unscreened blood, mother-to-child spread, contaminated water, are well understood and largely preventable. On that basis the WHO set the ambitious target of eliminating viral hepatitis as a public-health threat by 2030, defined as a 90 per cent cut in new infections and a 65 per cent cut in deaths.</p>
<p>The obstacle is delivery rather than science. The challenge is reaching the millions who are unknowingly infected, getting vaccines and medicines to the people who need them, and doing so affordably and fairly. World Hepatitis Day keeps that target in view and presses for the testing, funding and political commitment that the practical work demands.</p>
<h2 id="supporting-those-affected-and-the-problem-of-stigma">Supporting those affected, and the problem of stigma</h2>
<p>Beyond testing and treatment, the day exists to give a voice to people living with viral hepatitis, and that purpose is bound up with the question of stigma. Because hepatitis B and C can be transmitted through shared needles, unsafe sex or unscreened blood, an infection often carries unfair assumptions about how it was acquired, and those assumptions can be as damaging as the disease. People may delay testing for fear of judgement, conceal a diagnosis from family or employers, or face discrimination in healthcare and at work. Many who carry the virus did so from birth, having acquired hepatitis B from their mothers, and bear no responsibility whatever for it.</p>
<p>Confronting that stigma is part of the day’s work. By sharing their experiences openly, patients and their families help to normalise the conversation, encourage others to come forward for testing, and press for the right to dignified care. Patient organisations under the umbrella of the World Hepatitis Alliance have made this lived experience central to the campaign, on the principle that a disease hidden by shame is a disease that spreads unchecked. The same logic, that silence and stigma are themselves obstacles to health, connects hepatitis advocacy to other awareness movements across the medical calendar.</p>
<h2 id="how-it-is-observed">How it is observed</h2>
<p>Around 28 July, health ministries, hospitals, charities and patient groups run free testing campaigns, vaccination drives, public lectures and screening events. Landmarks in many cities are lit up to draw attention to the cause, and broadcasters and online platforms carry educational features built around the year’s unifying theme. The WHO and the World Hepatitis Alliance set that theme, often phrased to stress that elimination is achievable rather than merely desirable.</p>
<p>A commonly used emblem for the day shows arms raised together, representing solidarity in the face of the disease, and the messaging frequently pairs that image with the language of elimination. The intent is to counter the stigma that surrounds hepatitis, much of it tied to assumptions about how the virus is acquired, by giving patients a visible, collective voice. Campaigns have used slogans such as “Find the Missing Millions”, a reference to the great number of people who carry the virus without knowing it, to keep the focus squarely on the practical gap between the tools available and the people reached. The annual theme is announced ahead of the date so that organisers across different countries can build their events around a shared message.</p>
<h2 id="fun-facts">Fun facts</h2>
<ul>
<li>World Hepatitis Day falls on 28 July because that is the birthday of Baruch Blumberg, who discovered the hepatitis B virus in 1967.</li>
<li>The hepatitis B vaccine, developed from Blumberg’s work by 1969, was among the first vaccines shown to prevent a major human cancer, because chronic infection is a leading cause of liver cancer.</li>
<li>Resolution WHA63.18, adopted in 2010, was the first resolution on viral hepatitis ever passed by the World Health Assembly.</li>
<li>The hepatitis C virus was not even identified until 1989; today direct-acting antiviral drugs can cure more than 95 per cent of cases in a course of weeks.</li>
<li>Although five hepatitis viruses exist, the term also covers liver inflammation caused by alcohol and certain medicines, so not all hepatitis is infectious.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="a-closing-reflection">A closing reflection</h2>
<p>There is a peculiar frustration at the heart of this day, and it is worth sitting with. Most awareness days plead for a breakthrough that has not yet come; this one pleads for the use of breakthroughs already in hand. The vaccine exists, the cure exists, the knowledge of how the virus spreads exists, and still the disease kills on the scale of malaria. What 28 July really commemorates, then, is not a scientific gap but a human one, the distance between what medicine can do and what it is actually allowed to do for the people who need it, and the unglamorous, essential work of closing it.</p>
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