Hepatitis A Prevention Strategies, Haiti Case: Should Rescuers Be Immunized

Abstract

Hepatitis A virus (HAV), a small non-enveloped RNA virus from Picornaviridea family, causes approximately 1.5 million cases of acute hepatitis each year, and is still a major world health problem especially in developing countries. As the risk of getting infected by HAV increases at the time of crisis such as earthquakes, we tried to perform a brief review on current situation of HAV in Haiti, a country that experienced an earthquake measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale recently, and that it might be in danger of experiencing outbreaks of enterically transmittable infective agents such as HAV.