HOUSTON, Texas – While it might not be common to hear about children with Hepatitis B, officials at a Houston clinic say the disease is more common than many people think.
The Texas Department of State Health Services said no child in Harris County has been found with Hepatitis B in the last year. However, that’s not what the Texas Children’s Hepatology Clinic has found.
In fact, since the clinic opened in December of 2009, it has treated more than 40 children with the life-threatening disease. That’s why the clinic is launching a study to find out just how prevalent Hepatitis really is in children.
9-year-old China Penny has always had a lot of energy. But back in 2007, she became deathly ill.
Her grandmother, Patricia Johnigan, brought her to the emergency room at Texas Children’s Hospital and remembers being worried her granddaughter wasn’t going to make it.
"They didn’t know what was wrong with her. They had a lot of machines on her and they run a lot of different tests," said Johnigan.
Doctor Daniel Leung and other doctors soon realized Penny had Hepatitis B, a diagnosis she shared with more children than might be expected.
"The children might come to the clinic extremely sick, they may have yellow eyes, they may have yellow skin. But unfortunately in pediatrics, most children never show any symptoms," Leung explained. "So that means that there are probably hundreds and thousands of kids who have Hepatitis B, but those cases don’t get reported."
Leung said only acute cases are reported to the state, those children with yellow eyes or skin or those who are very sick. Leung and other health professionals believe symptoms or not, all kids with the disease should be tracked. That’s why the Hepatology Clinic at Texas Children’s Hospital is launching a citywide study.
"Hepatitis B is not a past-tense disease like Measles or Polio and it should be," said Leung.
To make the study possible, doctors from Texas Children’s Hospital have to reach out to pediatricians across Houston because, while many kids have Hepatitis, they don’t show symptoms and don’t report it.
"My hunch is that the number of new cases that we find is going to be significantly higher than what the city has reported," said Leung.
Leung said he believes the rise in Hepatitis could be due to children being adopted from other countries as well as the high number of immigrant families coming to Houston. He said it’s more reason than ever that all children receive the Hepatitis vaccine.
While the results of the study won’t be complete for 10 years, Leung said he plans to share preliminary results as they become available in the months ahead.
