There’s a disease that kills a staggering 1.34 million people per year worldwide. It wipes more than two hundred thousand Africans off the face of the planet annually. More than four people die from it every second. It isn’t HIV, nor is it tuberculosis. It’s viral hepatitis. Sadly, people generally don’t know much about it. This is why hepatitis patient advocate Danjuma Adda has made it his life’s mission to change that. In this instructive talk, he takes us on a journey into the ins and outs of the disease so that we can know a little more about it, and hopefully, care a bit more too. In short, the word hepatitis, derived from Greek, refers to liver and inflammation.
Chronic hepatitis leads to liver damage, which may progress to a condition known as liver cirrhosis, which could then ultimately lead to liver cancer. He hopes that while we survive the COVID-19 pandemic, all efforts should be put into accelerating the World Health Organisation’s stated goals of effectively eliminating the disease by 2030.