Which one of the following statements is not correct?

The correct answer is B. The statement is wrong because the reverse is true: Hepatitis B has a safe and effective vaccine, available since the early 1980s, and it is part of India's Universal Immunisation Programme (birth dose). Hepatitis C has no vaccine yet, which is why prevention for HCV depends on screening, safe blood and injection practices, and antiviral treatment.

Why the others are correct statements:

• A: HBV spreads through infected blood, sexual contact, needle sharing and mother-to-child transmission, the same routes as HIV.
• C: Chronic HBV and HCV infections number in the hundreds of millions worldwide, while HIV affects around 38 million people, so the statement holds.
• D: Chronic hepatitis B and C are often silent for years or decades, and symptoms appear only when liver damage such as cirrhosis or cancer develops.

Core concept: vaccine-preventable versus non-vaccine-preventable viral infections, and how modes of transmission and natural history shape public health policy. This links to the Health and Science and Technology sections of GS-II and III and to Mains questions on disease control.

Trap: Aspirants often assume every hepatitis has a vaccine, or they try to recall the exact vaccine history instead of noticing that the statement reverses the actual fact.