Hepatitis B

What Increases Your Risk

People who practice certain behaviors or have certain jobs are at high risk for becoming infected with hepatitis B virus (HBV). If you are a member of a high-risk group, you should receive the hepatitis B vaccine(What is a PDF document?).²

Risk factors for hepatitis B that you can control include:

• Being sexually active, including having unprotected sex with someone who is infected with the virus or whose sexual history is unknown to you.
• Having more than one sex partner. (Your risk for HBV infection is higher if you have another sexually transmitted disease such as chlamydia.)
• Sharing needles or other equipment (such as cotton, spoons, and water) to inject illegal drugs.
• Becoming infected with a sexually transmitted disease.

Job and lifestyle risk factors for hepatitis B include:

• Handling blood or body fluids as a routine part of your job. This includes health care workers, such as doctors, dentists, nurses, and blood and laboratory technicians, and students in these occupations. It also includes morticians and embalmers.
• Being an employee or resident of an institution for the developmentally disabled.
• Being an employee or inmate of a long-term prison.
• Spending more than 6 months in parts of the world where hepatitis B is common or where a large number of people have been infected for a long time with HBV. Such areas include Southeast and Central Asia, the islands of the South Pacific, the Amazon River basin, the Middle East, Africa, Eastern Europe, and China.
• Being a sexually active homosexual or bisexual man.
• Living with someone who has long-term (chronic) HBV infection.
• Getting body piercings and tattoos from a tattoo artist who uses poor infection-control practices.

Risk factors for hepatitis B that you cannot control include:

• Being born to a woman who is infected with HBV (if the newborn doesn't promptly receive the hepatitis B vaccine(What is a PDF document?) and hepatitis B immune globulin). But breast-feeding does not transmit the virus from a woman with HBV to her child.
• Having at some time lived in a part of the world where hepatitis B is common.
• Having a blood-clotting disorder, such as hemophilia, that requires you to receive clotting factors from human donors.
• Having severe kidney disease that requires you to have your blood filtered through a machine (hemodialysis).
• Being bitten by a person who is infected with HBV. (Note: HBV is not spread by kissing.)

Most people in the United States who have hepatitis are in one of the high-risk groups. But some people do not know how they became infected.

People with hepatitis B who engage in high-risk behavior (such as having multiple sex partners or injecting illegal drugs) are at increased risk for hepatitis C and HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

Should I be tested for hepatitis B and C?

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Author:	Maria G. Essig, MS, ELS	Last Updated: October 15, 2007
Medical Review:	Kathleen Romito, MD - Family Medicine W. Thomas London, MD - Hepatology
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