On August 20, the 23rd Chinese Medicine Workshop on Hepatobiliary Diseases of the Hepatobiliary Branch of China Association of Chinese Medicine was held in Guangzhou and Beijing in a mixture of online and offline. Wang Yu, expert advisor of Global Health Forum of Boao Forum for Asia and chairman of Chinese Foundation for Hepatitis Prevention and Control,delivered a keynote speech on the management of the whole disease course of viral hepatitis and related diseases.

According to Wang Yu, with the development in the global biomedical field in recent years, achievements have been made in the prevention and treatment of hepatitis and the resulting diseases, and the technical and material conditions to eliminate the harm of hepatitis are available. In 2016, WHO put forward the goal of eliminating viral hepatitis by 2030, reducing the number of new cases of hepatitis worldwide by 90% and reducing deaths due to hepatitis by 65%.

Currently, 390,000 people die from liver cancer in China each year, accounting for approximately 47% of all liver cancer deaths in the world. To reach the goal of eliminating viral hepatitis by 2030 is a daunting task for China, and immediate action is needed. The clock is ticking loudly.

Hepatitis, cirrhosis and liver cancer are different stages of one etiology.WHO considers hepatitis, cirrhosis and liver cancer as a whole and attributes the reduction of death and disease burden of cirrhosis and liver cancer to good control of hepatitis. The current practice is that hepatitis control is in infection and hepatology, liver fibrosis and cirrhosis are in gastroenterology, and detection and treatment of liver cancer, whether early, intermediate or late, are in oncology and cancer hospitals. According to WHO, the elimination of hepatitis needs the management of the whole course and separate treatment, which is a practical and deep requirement for taking the knowledge on disease burden and the prevention of disease as a whole.

Our urgent task is how to link the deeper understanding and intervention of hepatitis liver injury with the risk and active intervention of cirrhosis and liver cancer development.

WHO proposes that in order to reduce deaths from liver disease, we should first detect hepatitis virus infections in the population as much as possible, actively intervene in people with hepatitis and those at high risk of developing cirrhosis and liver cancer, and adopt a combination of antiviral therapy and other treatments to control the development from hepatitis to cirrhosis and liver cancer in people at high risk. In order to reduce the risk of hepatitis, we should not only rely on intervention at the stage of cirrhosis and liver cancer, but also focus on intervention at the stage of chronic hepatitis, which is "it is better to set up drains upstream than to block the water downstream ".

Wang Yu stressed that the treatment of cirrhosis and liver cancer is the last defense in the prevention and treatment of hepatitis hazards, and the critical stage is the pre-chronic hepatitis. The prevention and treatment of hepatitis needs the management of the whole course and separate treatment,, which requires cooperation of the whole society and the joint efforts of experts and scholars in various professional fields. Now, hepatitis elimination initiative has been launched in Hainan Province as a pilot. We hope to use this concept and method to precisely find patients and carry out effective intervention and long-term management, so as to achieve a significant increase in the detection rate and treatment rate, and achieve the purpose of hepatitis elimination.