Ill-defined Causes of Death in the Republic of Kiribati, 2005 to 2014.

This was a retrospective descriptive study of deaths in the Republic of Kiribati from 2005 to 2014. We determined the proportion of all deaths that are ill-defined and described the characteristics of these ill-defined deaths. There were 5618 deaths between 2005 to 2014; of these 1049 (18.

Infection frequency of hepatitis C virus and IL28B haplotypes in Papua New Guinea, Fiji, and Kiribati.

It has been estimated that there are more than 60 million Hepatitis C virus (HCV) carriers in the World Health Organisation's Western Pacific region (WHO-WPR), where liver cancer is among the top three causes of cancer death. WHO and the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention report the prevalence of HCV in the South Pacific islands (countries within the WHO-WPR) to be high (5-10% and >2% respectively). However, since HCV is not tested for in many of these countries, there is sparse data available to support this assertion.

Genomic analysis of hepatitis B virus reveals antigen state and genotype as sources of evolutionary rate variation.

Hepatitis B virus (HBV) genomes are small, semi-double-stranded DNA circular genomes that contain alternating overlapping reading frames and replicate through an RNA intermediary phase. This complex biology has presented a challenge to estimating an evolutionary rate for HBV, leading to difficulties resolving the evolutionary and epidemiological history of the virus. Here, we re-examine rates of HBV evolution using a novel data set of 112 within-host, transmission history (pedigree) and among-host genomes isolated over 20 years from the indigenous peoples of the South Pacific, combined with 313 previously published HBV genomes.