Hepatitis C Catches Up And Passes HIV

A Company recycles Used syringes

    It happens to be that I am Certified by various orgs and also was by DOH (Dept of Health….duhhh) to teach about Hep C. I had a brother who lost his liver and about 3 years latter after the transplant his life;  One good year but the others were hell can’t be that bad.    So I always fell close to the issue. I felt like it was so easy to learn how to not get it… and  NOT necessary.   All you need is information and help with the government allowing the Health Dep.s to give away sterile syringes and have secure boxes that can be had for the used  of used syringes that are collected so no other person gets sick from it.  I tried to teach the user, or the medically prescribed person, be Diabetes, Testa, and others on how not to become a statistic, particularly the user population.  They were instructed in what to do with those dirty syringes.  It is so much easier to catch hep C than HIV in a practical sense.  In HIV you need bodily fluids that have to fight bodily defenses, with Hep C all you need is a syringe that goes from blood right to the user's blood. There are no anti virus protection, boiling water is not that great, even though is better than nothing, but you are still putting your liver on the line.  When contaminated,  HIV blood is put on a table and the same for HepC 9 (Hep C Stays Out there enjoying the the environment for days.) HIV dies when exposed to air and oxygen after a while.   When the same thing i done to the blood with Hep C, the virus stays alive for days.

This virus is a lifetime affair. There is no cure and very little medication that will work on people with Hep C. Lots of people will need a liver replacement, I don’t need time spent letting you know how hard is to find one and match one that matches you and you are next on the list

In the US HIV cases are down 12,700 (CDC) this is down from more than 50,000 during the 90’s. Condoms and education, let me say again, education!! is what’s done the turn around. So We have stopped HIV and we got it on the run.  If people are getting the information and getting those test to find out. Those tests protect you if you are poz because you can be treated and hopefully you are not going to infect anybody else.  You will learn that there are many discordant couples (-+). Also is important that if you had a test 6 months ago and you do a self test lets say and you become + on the second, then you know the time line  which can be good for more than one reason, But the one I like is that you might not even need meds. BELIEVE me KNowing is better than not knowing, guessing if you infecting half of the city if you are very active. If you are - you know you are doing the right things. Having sex enjoying it and not exosing yourself because you know how to do things.

 The majority of the 3.2 million people who are estimated to have chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) in the U.S. are baby boomer adults.

And most of those infected with the virus do not know that they have it, which means they could easily be spreading it to others via exposure to blood—or, occasionally, sexual contact.

Although long-term intravenous drug users are at particular risk, so are “those who experimented with  [such] drugs for a limited time in their youth,” Harvey Alter and T. Jake Liang, both of the National Institutes of Health, wrote in an essay published online Monday in Annals of Internal Medicine. “These bygone experiences do not often connote risk to the affected persons nor serve as a reason to seek testing,” they noted, making this slow-developing disease difficult to catch before it develops into cirrhosis or liver cancer (hepatocellular carcinoma). Their essay was part of a four-paper special series on hepatitis C.

  More than 15,000 people died from hepatitis C-related issues in the U.S. in 2007—about three quarters of whom were people aged 45 to 64, according to Alter and Liang. And that number is expected to double as the bulk of the population with the disease get older. The cost of treating all of these people is likely to top $6.7 billion in the decade of 2010 to 2019.

Much of that growth is anticipated because those infected with hepatitis C often don’t seek treatment until the disease has caused serious damage, according to another paper published Monday in the same issue of Annals of Internal Medicine. “Hepatitis C virus infection is often asymptomatic or causes nonspecific symptoms (depression, arthralgia and fatigue) for decades,” Kathleen Ly, of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and her colleagues wrote in their paper.

The good news for those who do get diagnosed is that new hepatitis C drugs are coming onto the market. But they are not cheap. One new promising one, a protease inhibitor called boceprevir, runs about $1,100 per week, which when added to the double-drug cocktail of interfearon and the antiviral ribavirin, makes for especially expensive treatment. Some researchers have proposed that testing patients for a genotype that has a cure rate of less than 40 percent with previous treatment might help make treatment the more cost effective.

A new analysis in the same issue of Annals of Internal Medicine, led by Shan Liu of the Center for Health Policy at Stanford University, found that giving HCV patients of all genotypes a triple-drug cocktail is, indeed, cost-effective for allowing patients to live longer, healthier lives. And as Alter and Liang pointed out, as opposed to HIV or even hepatitis B, HCV can often be effectively cured after six months to a year of antiviral treatment. “Every effectively treated high-risk individual diminishes the infectious pool and the likelihood of secondary transmission.”

With treatment options expanding, many researchers are turning their attention back to the question of locating patients. “As innovative treatments for hepatitis C follow their now-destined progression, the most burning question will not be whether to treat, but rather how to identify the many chronic HCV carriers who are unaware of their infection and are at risk for cirrhosis, end-stage liver disease, or hepatocellular carcinoma,” Alter and Liang wrote.

Knowing that those born between 1945 and 1964 are at the highest risk for HCV infection could help guide screening, according to another study published in the same issue of the journal, led by David Rein, of the CDC. “Because HCV progresses slowly, the risk for serious complications is increasing among infected Americans as time passes,” he and his colleagues wrote. “Without changes in current case identification and treatment, deaths from HCV are forecasted to increase to 35,000 annually by 2030.”

About the Authors: Katherine Harmon is an associate editor for Scientific American covering health

 Adam Gonzalez, Hep C Certified Educator for adamfoxie*blogger
Company that recycles syringes