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Jennifer Choi
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NYU School of Medicine
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City Council Funds Asian American Hepatitis B Program For Third Consecutive Year

Program Will Expand into Eastern European, South American, and African Communities

New York, September 14, 2006 – With the burden of hepatitis B infection within the Asian American community still disproportionately high, the City Council of New York City funded the Asian American Hepatitis B Program (AAHBP) $3.5 million to operate their B-free campaign and program for a third consecutive year.  This is in addition to the $4.5 million that the Council had awarded the Program for the last two years.

The Program’s Director is Ms. Ruchel Ramos, MPA and the Program’s Principal Investigators include NYU faculty members, Henry Pollack, MD, Mariano Rey, MD, Alex Sherman, MD, Hillel Tobias, MD, and Thomas Tsang, MD.  NYU’s Center for the Study of Asian American Health (CSAAH), an NIH-funded center, is the central coordinating agency for the Program.  CSAAH is part of NYU’s new Institute for Community Health and Research, the Director of which is Dr. Mariano Rey.

Over the past two years, the AAHBP B-free Program has screened more than 4,000 Asian Americans for hepatitis B at 70 large screening events and more than 100 individual walk-in clinic sessions.  Among the group screened, more than 1,000 people were diagnosed with chronic hepatitis B and referred for evaluation and treatment.  In addition, the program provided more than 2,000 vaccines to protect those at-risk for catching the virus. The program has also developed culturally-appropriate educational brochures, workshops, and videos in Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, Vietnamese, Hindi, Urdu, and Bengali.  The in-person workshops alone have reached about 6,500 people and many more hundreds of people were reached through ads and articles in several ethnic newspapers and through live education programs on ethnic radio stations.

AAHBP findings have revealed that hepatitis B is more prevalent in Asian Americans, especially those born in East Asia, than in the general population. They have also shown that, among Asian American adults who had never been tested for hepatitis B, approximately 15 percent were infected with the virus.   People with hepatitis B are at risk for developing cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma, two life-threatening liver diseases that appear several decades after chronic hepatitis B infection. According to AAHBP’s research, these diseases affect New York City’s Asian American community at a much higher rate than the general population.

During its third year, the AAHPB will expand its B-free Program to other immigrant communities in NYC where hepatitis B infection is known to be more frequent, including persons born in Eastern Europe, the Caribbean, Central America, and Africa.  The B-free Program will use community-based educational workshops, public service announcements in ethnic newspapers and on local radio stations to increase the awareness of hepatitis B infection in the community and the need to be tested. This method has proven very effective in attracting persons to the regularly scheduled community-based screenings.  Overall, the AAHBP plans to screen at least 2,000 people in the coming year and provide vaccinations and other follow-up care as needed.  

The AAHBP is a community-based initiative whose members include the Chinese Community Partnership for Health at New York Downtown Hospital; Korean Community Services; American Cancer Society; the Charles B. Wang Community Health Center; Community Healthcare Network; the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation’s Bellevue Hospital Center and Gouverneur Healthcare Services; the New York University School of Medicine Center for the Study of the Asian American Health; and the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

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