GlobalHealthCuratedhigh confidence

Viral Hepatitis

A curable and preventable infection that still kills more people than malaria.

Severity score

44.4

Serious · default weighting

Trajectory

Worsening

What this is

Around 300 million people live with chronic hepatitis B or C. Vaccines and cures exist, but testing coverage is very low and most people who are infected do not know it. Deaths are rising even as other infectious disease mortality falls.

Score breakdown

Loss of life

58

Direct and attributable mortality, normalised across annual and cumulative tolls.

Lives negatively impacted

66

People displaced, injured, food-insecure, exposed or otherwise materially harmed.

Financial cost

26

Direct damage, lost output and health-system spend attributable to the event.

Environmental impact

2

Emissions, habitat and biodiversity loss, contamination and irreversibility.

Trajectory

50

Whether the situation is escalating, and how much worse it is plausibly getting.