Venereal Transmission of Hepatitis B Virus

To the Editor.—  The observations of Kiernan and Powers (241:585, 1979), that patients who are carriers for hepatitis B surface antigen often have inappropriate responses to questions about transmission risks, represent an important clinical point of information. Regardless of the small size of their study, the inference can be made that patients are often not clearly informed as to the infectious nature of their illness. This in part may be due to the rapidly growing mass of information surrounding hepatitis B and the changing clinical concepts associated with that growth.Although the venereal nature of this infection has long been recognized,¹ there have been few attempts to study its sexual transmission in a systematic fashion. The high rate of infection in homosexual men (238: 2625, 1977) is probably partially related to the dearth of public health measures aimed at patient education and prevention of spread. To this end, the