Study report on prevalence and risk factors associated with hepatitis B infection among dental health care workers

Health care providers (HCP) are constantly working towards improving the health and healing patients to achieve this state of well-being. This is accomplished by a detailed clinical examination followed by the various investigative procedures and finally when a diagnosis is reached based on the clinical and investigative findings, a treatment plan suited to the needs of the patient is devised. In providing these services to the patients, the HCP must be very careful and any carelessness on their part may expose to various diseases that the patientmaybe suffering from. This results in a vicious cycle of transmitting diseases from patients to HCP and auxiliaries and from them to other healthy patients. To stop this chain of transmission, the universal precaution that should always be followed is “all blood and hazardous body fluid must be considered infectious irrespective of a patient's diagnosis”.1 The unintentional transmission by inoculation occurs more frequently than is recognized, however, is suggested by the viability of the agent or agents, the infectiousness of minute quantities of blood, the existence of detected carriers in the population, and the ever increasing use of injections.2 As mentioned, the other infectious disease of great importance other than HIV is Hepatitis. An inflammatory liver disease and is generally caused by a virus. Hepatitis implies injury to livercharacterised by presence of inflammatory cells in the liver tissue.3 As a consequence of their parental mode of transmission andability to establish chronic infection, hepatitis types HBV, HDV and HCV are of particular concern for oral health care professionals.4 HB is 100 times more infectious than HIV and HB is the second only to tobacco as a cause of major cancer in humans.5 This is a cross sectional study done in a dental college, in north India to check the prevalence of hepatitis b in dental health care providers.