Age may be a factor in battling the hepatitis B virus (HBV), researchers from National Taiwan University’s College of Medicine said yesterday.
Why a majority of adults infected with the virus are able to fight off the virus, while most infected newborns and toddlers end up developing a chronic hepatitis B infection has long baffled doctors and scientists.
Graduate Institute of Clinical Medicine associate professor Wang Hurng-yi (王弘毅), one of the authors of the research, said nearly 95 percent of adult-acquired hepatitis B infections lead to spontaneous clearance, while more than 90 percent of infected newborns and about 30 percent of infected children aged between one and five years old are unable to fight off the virus and subsequently develop a chronic infection.
“These statistics suggest that a person’s immune clearance of hepatitis B — which has affected nearly 2 billion people worldwide — is heavily age-related. However, as the reason for this remains unknown, our research team has made it its mission to find an answer,” Wang told a press conference in Taipei.
As a baby’s postnatal gut microbiota is not established until a toddler is two or three years old, the researchers presumed that gut commensals might be mainly responsible for preparing the liver’s immune system to fight the hepatitis B virus.
To prove this hypothesis, the researchers injected the virus into mice that ranged from from six-to-12 weeks old. They discovered that adult mice were able to clear the hepatitis B virus within six weeks after the injection, while their young remained hepatitis B virus-positive even after 26 weeks.
“We laced the drinking water of mice aged between five weeks and 12 weeks old with an antibiotic to have them gut-sterilized, resulting in a noticeable reduction in the level of gut bacteria DNA in stools,” Wang said.
Although the amount of stool bacteria in mice given antibiotics returned to normal shortly after antibiotic treatment ended, they were unable to clear the hepatitis B virus after they matured, Wang said.
The researchers also found that mice with the toll-like 4 receptor (TLR4) mutation were able to fight off the hepatitis B virus regardless of their age, offering a potential new treatment for neonates infected with hepatitis B at birth.
Chen Ding-shinn (陳定信), a hepatitis specialist and former head of the university’s College of Medicine, said more than half of the hepatitis B carriers in Taiwan caught the virus from their infected mothers during delivery.
“The link discovered between TLR4 deficiency in mice and the ability to clear HBV could be a giant step forward in finding ways to break the cycle of mother-to-newborn infection,” Chen said.
The research was published in the online version of the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday.
The Taipei Zoo on Saturday said it would pursue legal action against a man who was filmed climbing over a railing to tease and feed spotted hyenas in their enclosure earlier that day. In videos uploaded to social media on Saturday, a man can be seen climbing over a protective railing and approaching a ledge above the zoo’s spotted hyena enclosure, before dropping unidentified objects down to two of the animals. The Taipei Zoo in a statement said the man’s actions were “extremely inappropriate and even illegal.” In addition to monitoring the hyenas’ health, the zoo would collect evidence provided by the public
A decision to describe a Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement on Singapore’s Taiwan policy as “erroneous” was made because the city-state has its own “one China policy” and has not followed Beijing’s “one China principle,” Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Tien Chung-kwang (田中光) said yesterday. It has been a longstanding practice for the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to speak on other countries’ behalf concerning Taiwan, Tien said. The latest example was a statement issued by the PRC after a meeting between Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財) and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on the sidelines of the APEC summit
A road safety advocacy group yesterday called for reforms to the driver licensing and retraining system after a pedestrian was killed and 15 other people were injured in a two-bus collision in Taipei. “Taiwan’s driver’s licenses are among the easiest to obtain in the world, and there is no mandatory retraining system for drivers,” Taiwan Vision Zero Alliance, a group pushing to reduce pedestrian fatalities, said in a news release. Under the regulations, people who have held a standard car driver’s license for two years and have completed a driver training course are eligible to take a test
Taiwan’s passport ranked 34th in the world, with access to 141 visa-free destinations, according to the latest update to the Henley Passport Index released today. The index put together by Henley & Partners ranks 199 passports globally based on the number of destinations holders can access without a visa out of 227, and is updated monthly. The 141 visa-free destinations for Taiwanese passport holders are a slight decrease from last year, when holders had access to 145 destinations. Botswana and Columbia are among the countries that have recently ended visa-free status for Taiwanese after “bowing to pressure from the Chinese government,” the Ministry
RSS