I have natural immunity to Hepatitis B. Do I pose risk to others?
Some time ago I was rejected as donor and received following rejection letter:
Just wanted to inform you that there was a positive infectious disease
result for Hepatitis B. Unfortunately, we cannot take donors into the
program with a positive Hepatitis B test result due to the inventory
possibly being compromised.
And the following test results were attached to the rejection letter:
Hepatitis Bc IgM Ab: NON-REACTIVE (Anti-HBc IgM)
Hepatitis Bs Ag: NON-REACTIVE (HBsAg)
Hepatitis Bc Ab: REACTIVE (HBcAb)
Obviously, I don't want to be a donor, if I pose risk to someone else. So I am fine with their judgment, if it is in best interest of others.
However, now I am curious, especially after I found this CDC website and I am trying to understand under which category I fall under.
My understanding is that I fall under "Immune due to natural infection" and that it is actually impossible for me to infect others via sexual intercourse or if someone else uses my blood?
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The Hepatitis B core antibody test is positive for IgG but negative for IgM indicating that you had the hepatitis B infection a while ago. The negative hepatitis B surface antigen test means that they are not detecting the hepatitis B in your blood when testing for the virus surface antigen. This means you've successfully cleared the infection to a very low level. You don't mention the hepatitis B surface antibody levels which are usually used to determine if you're now immune eg. after a series of hepatitis B vaccinations.
This doesn't mean you don't have the virus in your system. Immunosuppressants such as methotrexate and TNF inhibitors could still potentially reactivate the hepatitis B infection. So, you'd want to measure the HBV DNA viral load and then track that serially to see if such treatment causes a reactivation.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24805974
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