I wasn't feeling sick, but I had Hepatitis B: The fight against a hiding virus

Night Sheritan walked into the antenatal clinic when she was four months pregnant, expecting routine reassurance. She and her husband had been preparing for their third child with the particular quietness of people who have done this before, discussing names, slowly rearranging the house, imagining what a third child would add to a family that already felt complete. The clinic visit was a formality; a tick on the calendar. Then the blood test came back.

"Night, you have tested positive for hepatitis B."

She asked the doctor to repeat the test in her presence. The second result also came back positive.

"I felt numb," she says. "I didn't even know what hepatitis B really was."

Also read: Prevention and treatment of Hepatitis B

She had no symptoms; no jaundice, no persistent fatigue, none of the signs associated with liver disease. She considered herself healthy. The diagnosis arrived not through illness but through a routine screening, the kind that most Kenyans never have; the test is typically offered only to expectant mothers.

"I couldn't understand how I could have hepatitis B when I wasn't sick," she says.

Her confusion is one of the most common responses doctors hear. Hepatitis B is called a "silent infection" because the majority of people who carry the virus have no idea. It causes no immediate pain, no obvious symptoms, no signal that something is wrong, while the virus quietly damages the liver over years and decades. By the time symptoms appear, the damage is often severe; by the time many people test, it is already late.