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June 28: Treating Hepatitis

lawrencebush
June 28, 2011
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\"\"<\/a>World Hepatitis Day, June 28th, was endorsed by the World Health Organization in 2010. The date also marks the birthdate in 1925 of Baruch Samuel \"Barry\" Blumberg, the 1976 Nobel Prize-winning physician who identified the Hepatitis B virus and developed a vaccine to treat it. Blumberg was an Orthodox yeshiva bokher<\/em> in Flatbush before becoming a physician at Columbia Medical College. In the 1950s, he travelled widely to collect human blood samples to study genetic factors in disease. After discovering the antigen for heptatitis B (in the blood of an Australian aborigine), he developed a screening test for it and a vaccine, which he freely distributed in order to encourage drug companies to make use of it. Blumberg also directed the NASA INstitute for Astrobiology from 1999 to 2002. He died on April 5, 2011.\"Our planet is an improved place as a result of Barry's few short days in residence,\" said former NASA administrator Daniel Goldin.<\/p>\n

\"[Saving lives] is what drew me to medicine. There is, in Jewish thought, this idea that if you save a single life, you save the whole world\" \u2014Baruch Blumberg<\/p>"]

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