Treat Patients with Life-Saving Hepatitis B Meds

Hepatitis B Free extends its wishes for a blessed holiday season to all our supporters and friends.  We hope that each one of you is finding personal joy and peace amidst the many challenges that 2025 has brought.  Your faithful support has enabled us to continue our efforts to relieve the suffering of those afflicted with hepatitis.

Our teams have been busy since our last report in September.  In early October, we started a new project in the country of Tuvalu.  We were impressed by the enthusiasm and dedication of the health care professionals at the Princess Margaret Hospital which is the referral hospital for the country.  The capital of Tuvalu is on Funafuti, a long, slender mid-Pacific island with about 7000 inhabitants which is dominated by the airport runway.  Princess Margaret Hospital, a 40-bed facility, serves as the main referral institution and provides primary care (including antenatal) for the entire island.  The rest of Tuvalu’s 11,000 population lives on remote islands with a maximum of 300-400 inhabitants on each island.  We evaluated patients alongside physicians at the hospital, gave grand rounds, provided training and met with representatives from the lab, pharmacy, radiology, and administration.  We are optimistic that we can help expand treatment across the main island and into the outer islands as we have done in Kiribati and help the lab and pharmacy save money on medications and supplies.  We will continue to support our colleagues there through telemedicine and hope to return in 2026.

Later in October, we sent a team of 2 physicians and a nurse from Australia to work in Kiribati.  Our travel was partially funded by a grant from the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), as well as from our generous donors.  We worked alongside our colleagues in Kiribati in clinics located in South Tarawa and the outer islands of North Tarawa and Abaiang.  We accomplished several objectives:

--Delivery of baseline knowledge regarding hepatitis B to local residents.  We are developing new educational materials using AI tools.

--Screening, linkage to care and treatment of existing and new patients.

--Improved our linkage to care pathway for hepatitis B-positive antenatal women, a critical population for the prevention of new infections.

--Established processes for decentralised hepatitis care at the village level, utilizing local nurses.

--Created a telehealth link between our clinicians in New Caledonia and Australia and village health care workers to provide expert consultation that is available 24/7.

--Met with physicians from Doctors without Borders about a collaborative effort to support clinic-level outreach to improve adherence.

The coming year will be very challenging as we continue to see an uptick in demand for our services.  We will start an outreach to one of the outer islands on Tonga.  We will travel 3 times to Kiribati and several of its outer islands.  We plan to return to our projects in Papua New Guinea, Mongolia, Tuvalu, and Madagascar.  In addition, we have requests from physicians in the Solomon Islands and Samoa to assist them in establishing hepatitis treatment programs.  We continue to support local educational programs in Australia.  We strive to publish academic papers (we have one paper under review at this time) and will deliver presentations describing our initiatives at national and international hepatitis conferences.  We continue to apply for external funding, and recently HBF received a small grant from the World Health Organization to evaluate the use of community volunteers to improve medication adherence.

These projects will keep us very busy during 2026.  Your prayers and invaluable financial support encourage us and have enabled HBF to continue our programs despite the many challenges that we have encountered.  We wish you many blessings during this holiday season and in the year to come.

Sincerely,

David