HEPATITIS B: SYMPTOMS
Infection with hepatitis B may not be noticeable (‘asymptomatic’, or ‘subclinical’, doctors call it), or it may make you ill, even so ill you need to be in hospital. The virus affects the liver, so the liver may malfunction for a few weeks, making you sick with vomiting, weakness, headaches, and maybe dark wee and pale poo, and yellow skin. This phase usually hits between six weeks and six months after the bug has entered the blood stream. After the initial infection, one of two things will happen. Your body may have fought the bug, and it goes away, and you are no longer ‘infectious’ (able to pass the bug on to anyone else). Or sometimes, and we don’t know exactly why, the bug hangs around in the blood stream. You don’t usually feel sick, or even know it is there, but it is, and you are therefore infectious. This may be lifelong.
Having the bug in the blood stream (being a ‘carrier’), may do you no harm. (It may not be too good for other people if you give it to them; see ‘prevention’.) Unfortunately, a proportion of carriers do get problems, in the form of ‘chronic hepatitis’. This means that the bug gradually destroys the liver, or increases the risk of cancer of the liver. This is definitely not a good thing. We need livers to live.
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