"Answers generate more questions"
- By Wits University
Professor Anna Kramvis from the School of Clinical Medicine in the Wits Faculty of Health Science, delivered an inaugural lecture entitled Hepatitis B Virus: A Millionth of the Human Genome on 3 October 2013. The Hepatitis B virus (HBV) is the smallest DNA virus infecting man and it is second only to cigarette smoking as an agent causing human cancer.
Although an effective vaccine against this virus is currently available, inoculation will not help those already infected. Over two billion humans, a third of the world’s population,
have been infected with HBV during their lifetime and at least 240 million individuals, of which 65 million reside in Africa, are chronically infected with the virus.
These carriers are at risk of death as a result of serious liver disease, including cirrhosis and liver cancer, which cause an estimated half a million deaths a year. Although chronic hepatitis B is listed in the top ten diseases in the world, its research in Africa is a low priority because it has been eclipsed by the major infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. The strains of the HBV circulating in Africa differ from those found in other regions of the world where the virus is hyperendemic.
This lecture focused on the research carried out to study of sequence variation of African HBV strains, their functional characterisation and their role in the clinical manifestation of liver disease.
See the slideshow of Kramvis’ lecture
Professor Anna Kramvis from the School of Clinical Medicine in the Wits Faculty of Health Science, delivered an inaugural lecture entitled Hepatitis B Virus: A Millionth of the Human Genome on 3 October 2013. The Hepatitis B virus (HBV) is the smallest DNA virus infecting man and it is second only to cigarette smoking as an agent causing human cancer.
Although an effective vaccine against this virus is currently available, inoculation will not help those already infected. Over two billion humans, a third of the world’s population, have been infected with HBV during their lifetime and at least 240 million individuals, of which 65 million reside in Africa, are chronically infected with the virus.
These carriers are at risk of death as a result of serious liver disease, including cirrhosis and liver cancer, which cause an estimated half a million deaths a year. Although chronic hepatitis B is listed in the top ten diseases in the world, its research in Africa is a low priority because it has been eclipsed by the major infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. The strains of the HBV circulating in Africa differ from those found in other regions of the world where the virus is hyperendemic.
This lecture focused on the research carried out to study of sequence variation of African HBV strains, their functional characterisation and their role in the clinical manifestation of liver disease.
See the slideshow of Kramvis’ lecture