We need our livers. Well, we need all the organs in our body, but the liver is one of the hardest to replace next to our heart and our brain, so we do need to take extra care of it. The liver is the organ that cleans our blood of toxins, and the organ that stores some of the energy that we need every day.

One of the things we have to watch out for in order to take care of our liver is hepatitis B. It’s an infectious disease caused by the hepatitis B virus. You can get hepatitis B from contact with the body fluids of a person with the hepatitis B virus, like during sexual intercourse or blood transfusions.
Adults and older children usually recover from hepatitis B on their own, and often just think it’s the flu because the symptoms are mostly similar. Most people recover after about three weeks of being sick. Hepatitis B can’t be cured, but science has come up with various vaccines that can be used to prevent hepatitis B from happening. Different treatments have also been developed to help the body to fight it.

The vaccine is administered in a series of three shots, although children need only get the first two. People need to get the vaccine when they are young because the effects of hepatitis B on children are worse than they are for adults. Adults, however, need also take vaccines if they are at risk of being exposed to the virus.

The treatments are meant to stop the virus from replicating itself. According to scientific research studies, the hepatitis B virus is the kind that replicates by inserting itself into the DNA of the liver cells. The body can take care of the virus, but it has more difficulty with the liver cells that have been contaminated. The treatments will give the body more time to deal with these cells.