Hepatitis B is at its most dangerous when it is transmitted earliest. A newborn who contracts it from their mother has a high chance of carrying it for life, with cirrhosis and liver cancer waiting decades down the line. The prevention is unglamorous and extremely effective: test the mother in antenatal care, and give the baby the vaccine's first dose within hours of birth.
On Tuesday, at a ceremony attended by President Lula, Health Minister Alexandre Padilha and WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Brazil formally presented its dossier to PAHO and WHO seeking validation that it has eliminated mother-to-child transmission of hepatitis B. [1]
The numbers behind the application: prevalence among children under five below the 0.1 percent threshold, held for two consecutive years, with antenatal care coverage above 95 percent and birth-dose vaccine coverage over 90 percent. [1] Fewer than one in a thousand Brazilian under-fives carrying the virus, two years running.
One precision that matters: this is an application, not a decision. Validation now goes through an initial PAHO assessment, then an independent expert panel, then a final evaluation by WHO's Global Validation Advisory Committee. [1] Brazil has hit the numbers and filed. The certificate comes later, or does not.
"The Region of the Americas has shown that it is possible to protect new generations from hepatitis B through vaccination," said PAHO Director Jarbas Barbosa. [1]
The week's other quiet result comes from 37 American community hospitals, the kind of place where most cancer patients are actually treated. In an ECOG-ACRIN randomized trial of 306 people diagnosed with cancer within the previous four months, patients were offered either usual care or video counseling plus nicotine replacement products. At six months, "28% of patients who were provided with video counseling and nicotine replacement products had quit," against "only 15% of the group who got usual care." [2]
Nearly double, from a telehealth call and a patch. The trial was led by Elyse Park of Mass General Brigham and co-led by Jamie Ostroff of Memorial Sloan Kettering, and published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. [2]
Quitting smoking after a cancer diagnosis is not symbolic. It improves treatment response and survival, and it is also the hardest possible moment to ask anyone to do anything. Thirteen percentage points, at 37 hospitals with no specialist cessation program of their own, is the sort of finding that changes what an ordinary oncology clinic can offer on a Tuesday afternoon.
