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Xinhua news reports that

“ China is set to issue regulations to remove hepatitis B check from physical examination for school entrance and work, according to the Ministry of Health.

Mao Qunan, a spokesman with the ministry, said here Tuesday that the move was based on related organizations’ thorough demonstration in regard to whether hepatitis B carriers will affect other people’s health.”

The reason for the sudden lift is unclear, but Chinese health authorities seem to indicate that they now understand the virus to be safe for the workplace.

“‘As we know more about the hepatitis B virus, our prevention and treatment measures become more specific,’ said Xie Rao, a senior liver disease physician with the Beijing Ditan Hospital, adding that the move showed that the country’s understanding of the disease had entered a higher level.

Zhuang Hui, a professor with the Peking University Health Science Center, said that hepatitis B virus can be transmitted through blood, sex and mother to baby transmission while daily contact in study and work will not lead to infection.”

This reasoning has ruffled the feathers of Peking Duck, which had this to say;

Hepatitis B has been around about as long as humanity itself and has been well understood for many decades. There has been no sudden breakthrough that convinced the Chinese authorities that it was safe to end the ban, and the line that their understanding has now “entered a higher level” is baffling. All they did was catch up with what’s been common knowledge around the world for years: hepatitis B carriers, like those who test positive for AIDS, pose no extraordinary danger to their colleagues.

If this actually happens and the ban is lifted, I give China credit for reversing what was a vile policy. That it took this long, ruining many people’s lives along the way, is a tragedy.

Baffling or not, the ban has been lifted. Maybe now we can move on to disproving wide held assumptions that HIV can be transmitted through mucus.

To read more, check out this post by Peking Duck on exactly how the Hepatitis B in the workplace ban impacted China’s people.