About 40 students received free testing for hepatitis B, hepatitis C and HIV infections, which would normally cost around $700, in the Marvin Center Tuesday night.

Students in the Milken Institute School of Public Health and the School of Medicine and Health Sciences partnered with the Hepatitis B Initiative of Washington, DC, the GWU Multicultural Association of Premed Students and other student organizations on campus to host the event. Event organizers used Powerpoint presentations, trivia games and poster boards to educate students and community members about these infections and celebrate April as National Minority Health Month.

Jane Pan, the executive director of the HBI-DC, said the group’s mission is to save lives and educate immigrant communities about their hepatitis and HIV status. She said that she hopes students will understand this message and bring it home to educate their parents.

“People who have chronic hepatitis, there’s no symptoms so they don’t even know, so early detection is the key,” Pan said. “Hepatitis is a silent disease and if they find out early it is treatable and preventable.”

Pan said HBI-DC has partnered with Johns Hopkins University, the University of Maryland and Georgetown University to educate college students and hopes that other universities will want to join the movement.

Emmeline Ha, a third-year medical student at SMHS and volunteer for HBI-DC, said she met with Pan about two months ago to discuss bringing HIV education to GW.

“A lot of my aunts and uncles had HBV infection and complications like liver cirrhosis and cancer,” she said. “For immigrant communities, it really is a big deal and it affects a lot of people.”

Ha said that she travels with HBI-DC to community centers and local churches, and that she wanted to get involved in medicine to reach out to the Asian American community.

Ha added that she wants students to become educated about their own health and their community’s health so that they can “work towards ending these viruses forever.”

Jasmine Noel, a graduate student studying international affairs, said she attended the event to learn more about hepatitis B and C. She said the free tests are helpful because getting tested can be difficult and expensive.

“I think it’s really important to have these tests,” Noel said. “In our early twenties, there are a lot of things we just don’t pay attention to.”