New Delhi: The ‘Illness to Wellness’ initiative, a national campaign aimed at generating awareness on various mind and body conditions and providing holistic and broad stakeholder engagements- with the overall objective of promoting healthy living, in collaboration with the Institute of Liver and Biliary Sciences (ILBS), has embarked on a mission to spread awareness about prevention and control of mother-to-child transmission of viral hepatitis through its ‘Winning Over Mothers With Hepatitis B’ (WOMB) initiative.
Hepatitis B infects over 40 million people in India and most patients continue to suffer as the society largely remains weighed down by misconceptions related to the disease.
In order to highlight the state of Hepatitis B patients and the lack of awareness about the disease, ILBS in association with Illness to Wellness, organised an awareness session in which they emphasized on how they are working towards allaying fears, overcoming stigmas and dispelling myths about the disease.
During the session, Dr. Shiv K Sarin, Director & Chancellor, ILBS, and Dr. Arti Ahuja, Ex-Secretary, Ministry of Labour & Employment, Government of India, expressed grave concerns at the discrimination faced by Hepatitis B patients and spoke about the need to ensure vaccination and importance of information dissemination through persistent efforts to end the shame associated with the disease.