“Researchers have developed an epigenetic-editing therapy that could eventually offer a functional cure for chronic hepatitis B, meaning long-term control of the virus without ongoing treatment. Using a CRISPR-based tool that chemically tags the virus’s DNA to switch it off without cutting it, the treatment left 90 percent of mice on the highest dose with no detectable signs of hepatitis B in their blood. A human trial of the therapy is now underway,” reports The Doomslayer.
Nature explains:
“A wave of epigenetic therapies is offering hope as ways to cure chronic hepatitis B — a lingering liver infection that is caused by the hepatitis B virus (HBV) and affects more than 250 million people around the world. Currently available drugs often fail to eradicate the virus from the body.
Gene-editing therapies — which make cuts to the DNA strands — have been explored but for hepatitis B, they can increase cancer risks. Researchers are turning instead to epigenetic editing, which modifies markers attached to the DNA to alter how genes are turned on and off.
Scientists working at the biotechnology firm nChroma Bio in Boston, Massachusetts, and at institutes in Milan, Italy, have now placed chemical tags onto the HBV genome to shut down its gene activity and prevent it from producing viral particles. They achieved promising results in experiments on human liver cells and in mice, and the therapy generated only minimal and temporary side effects when tested in monkeys.”
Taiwan is close to eliminating hepatitis C. As Wikipedia notes, “Hepatitis C is an infectious disease caused by the hepatitis C virus (HCV) that primarily affects the liver; it is a type of viral hepatitis… Early symptoms can include fever, dark urine, abdominal pain, and jaundice. The virus persists in the liver, becoming chronic, in about 70% of those initially infected. Early on, chronic infection typically has no symptoms. Over many years however, it often leads to liver disease and occasionally cirrhosis. In some cases, those with cirrhosis will develop serious complications such as liver failure, liver cancer, or dilated blood vessels in the esophagus and stomach. HCV is spread primarily by blood-to-blood contact associated with injection drug use, poorly sterilized medical equipment, needlestick injuries in healthcare, and transfusions.”
Lots of Egyptians used to have hepatitis B, but today, less than 1% of Egyptian children have the disease.
Hepatitis B is the most common type of hepatitis worldwide. About 300 million people are infected globally, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia.
“Between the 1950s and 1980s, inadvertent infection transmission associated with unsafe injection practices occurred in the attempt to control schistosomiasis, a parasitic disease carried by water snails. Over 6 million Egyptians were infected with hepatitis C in this way.”
Egypt had the highest rate of Hepatitis C in the world. 15% of the Egyptian population were infected with Hepatitis C. But Egypt has greatly reduced its Hepatitis C rate, from 10% to 0.38% in a little over a decade.
In other good news, the African nation of Guinea recently eradicated sleeping sickness, a parasitic disease carried by the tsetse fly that causes irreversible brain damage and then death, if left untreated (sleeping sickness also leads to disrupted sleeping patterns, aggressiveness, psychosis, and bizarre behavior).
Niger recently became the first nation in Africa to eliminate river blindness, a disease spread by flies that breed near rivers. Those flies carry long thin parasitic worms that burrow in the sufferer’s skin.
