Hepatitis C News

All-oral direct-acting antiviral regimens delivered within a multidisciplinary care model are safe and effective in treating hepatitis C virus infection in people who inject drugs, according study findings published in Open Forum Infectious Diseases.

Despite the availability of highly effective direct-acting antiviral therapy for chronic hepatitis C virus infection, both public and private health insurers in the United States continue to deny coverage for the drugs at increasingly high rates, according to a study published today in Open Forum Infectious Diseases.

WASHINGTON — In this exclusive video perspective from Digestive Disease Week 2018, Steven L. Flamm, MD, chief of the Liver Program at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Illinois, reviews some of the important clinical presentations in liver disease from the meeting.

The Canadian Association for the Study of the Liver, or CASL, released a guideline today that now recommends screening patients born between 1945 and 1975 for hepatitis C virus.

WASHINGTON — In this exclusive video perspective from Digestive Disease Week 2018, Zobair M. Younossi, MD, chairman of the department of medicine at Inova Fairfax Hospital in Virginia, discusses insurance coverage and mortality in patients with hepatitis C in the U.S.

The American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases and the Infectious Diseases Society of America recently updated their hepatitis guideline website, HCVguidelines.org, to include several new testing and management recommendations for pregnant women, men who have sex with men, people who inject drugs and incarcerated individuals.

Between 2001 and 2011, more than 130,000 patients may have been exposed to hepatitis C virus infection because of medical errors, and only 37% were proactively notified before the onset of symptoms, according researchers.

This month’s issue and the current issue of its sister publication HCV Next, highlights data on therapeutic regimens for hepatitis C presented at the International Liver Congress. The meeting highlighted how high is the summit to which we’ve climbed after years of a massive international effort to cure HCV, and how much the focus is shifting. We heard little about new HCV regimens and instead focused on real-world data sets on existing regimens and, equally important, the theme that HCV treatment has become as much of as social science as a medical one as we strive toward elimination. We saw an appropriate emphasis being placed on screening, linkage and access to care, including underprivileged and high-risk populations, on a national and global scale.

Viral hepatitis refers to several types of inflammatory liver infections that can lead to serious complications like fibrosis or cirrhosis. While some types of hepatitis may be prevented with vaccination and others can clear spontaneously, many patients remain unaware of the risks for infection or their current infection status.

The direct-acting antiviral era has seen a significant increase in the number of patients with hepatitis C clearing their infection. Along with this, public awareness of the disease and its highly effective cure has increased. However, many barriers still exist to finding all patients with HCV to achieve the WHO’s goal of global elimination.