The Knowledge Gap in White Coats: Why Hepatitis Awareness Starts With Us

This article was exclusively written for The European Sting by Ms. Amina Rafi, a third-year medical student at Avicenna Medical College, Lahore, Pakistan. She is affiliated with the International Federation of Medical Students Associations (IFMSA), cordial partner of The Sting. The opinions expressed in this piece belong strictly to the writers and do not necessarily reflect IFMSA’s view on the topic, nor The European Sting’s one.

Medical students are trained to correct misconceptions about hepatitis. But what happens when those same misconceptions exist among the future doctors doing the correcting?

Every year on 28 July, the world marks World Hepatitis Day, a reminder that millions still face preventable illness because of late diagnosis, misinformation, and unequal access to care. WHO’s campaign centers on breaking down the barriers between people and the care they need. But before we dismantle those barriers in our communities, we have to ask: how many are still standing inside our own medical schools?

So we surveyed more than 200 medical and allied health students at Avicenna Medical College about what they know, believe, and do around hepatitis. Some of it was reassuring. Most of it wasn’t.

93% correctly named blood-to-blood contact as hepatitis’s main transmission route. But ask a sharper question and the picture changes fast: 57% either believed Hepatitis C is vaccine-preventable, or weren’t sure. It isn’t. Unlike Hepatitis B, there’s no vaccine for Hepatitis C, a distinction these students will one day have to explain to a patient.

The practice numbers were harder to read past. 60% had never been screened or tested for hepatitis themselves. Over a 30 percent weren’t fully vaccinated against Hepatitis B, despite routine clinical exposure. And 81% had never attended a single seminar or workshop on the topic, even though 84% said their curriculum covered it.

The open-ended answers made it concrete. The most repeated misconception was that hepatitis spreads through casual contact, handshakes, hugging, sharing food. A few students believed it was untreatable outright, or that every type of hepatitis behaves the same way. This is the group about to start diagnosing and counselling patients, carrying the public’s misconceptions.

There was one hopeful number. Fifty-five percent said they’d help organize or attend a student-led awareness session, and another 24% said maybe. The willingness exists. It just hasn’t been asked for yet.

Closing that gap doesn’t need new funding or infrastructure. It needs students to run with it, peer-education sessions, campus screening drives, conversations that catch the casual-contact myth before it reaches a patient, and schools willing to give that work room. Because right now, the gap isn’t in the curriculum. It’s in the 57% of us who still don’t know Hepatitis C has no vaccine.

About the author

Amina Rafi is a third-year medical student at Avicenna Medical College, Lahore, Pakistan. She serves as Vice President of Ravish Avicenna and is a Research Bridge MD Ambassador, contributing to student leadership, research advocacy, and academic initiatives. Her interest in medical education inspired her to conduct this survey, exploring hepatitis knowledge and misconceptions among her peers. Amina believes that empowering medical students through evidence-based education and meaningful dialogue is essential to improving patient care and advancing public health.