China faces huge task in Hepatitis B fight

BEIJING, July 26 (Reuters) China still faces an uphill struggle in vaccinating against Hepatitis B despite achieving considerable success over the last few years due to poverty and lack of funds, health officials said.

In China -- where 10 per cent of the population, or 120 million people, suffer from chronic Hepatitis B -- a million children a year, mainly in the impoverished west of the country, are not vaccinated on time, they said yesterday.

But a push supported by the GAVI Alliance, which is funded by European countries, the United States and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has meant that China's immunisation rate for newborns has risen to 90 per cent from 60 per cent in 1999.

''There are still a lot of problems in immunisation work.

For example, the funding from the government for immunisation is far from enough for the demand, and the conditions in some areas are quite poor,'' vice health minister Jiang Zuojun told a news conference.

While it is relatively easy to ensure babies born in hospital are within 24 hours given their first shot against a disease which can cause liver failure and cancer, reaching children born at home, as often happens in remote areas, remains a problem.

Health officials added that another challenge was reaching tens of million of migrant workers, who have flocked to the cities from the countryside, hoping to ride the economic boom.

''It's very difficult to manage such a population, and the immunisation level for their newborns is very low,'' said Yang Weizhong, director of China's Centre for Disease Control and Prevention's Disease Control and Emergency Response Office.

The government has set a target of bringing the infection rate in the general population down to seven percent by 2010, and fighting Hepatitis B is a key part of China's health strategy for the next five years, Yang added.

REUTERS DKB DS1055