The New Yorker::

Why does hepatitis B, which can lead to liver cancer, often go undetected, even though tests exist?

By Ingfei Chen

Early one morning in June, 2017, Todd Doan woke his husband, Wylliam Soliwoda-Doan, to say that he was going to the hospital. Doan, a music teacher at an elementary school in East Orange, N.J., had spent the previous week in bed with unusual fatigue and a deep, hacking cough. His upper abdomen and back hurt persistently. He’d seen his primary-care doctor, who’d prescribed Prevacid, for acid reflux; when that didn’t help, the doctor referred him to get X-rays. Doan had planned to book a test within a few days. Three days later, at 3 a.m., he decided to drive to the E.R. near his home in New Jersey to get them done immediately.

Doan, a short, bespectacled forty-three-year-old Vietnamese American with a jovial disposition, was raising three young foster kids and two adopted teen-agers with his husband. He conducted a youth orchestra in Manhattan, and on weekends he waited tables at a sushi restaurant. He hardly ever called in sick. At the E.R., the medical staff suspected a gallbladder attack and admitted him. When they performed an ultrasound, however, they detected a large mass in his abdomen. Blood tests suggested an inflamed liver.

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