Hepatitis C News

For the treatment of chronic hepatitis C genotype 1 through 6 infections, glecaprevir and pibrentasvir demonstrated safety and efficacy in patients with compensated liver disease, including those with chronic kidney disease stage 4 or 5, according to results pooled from nine phase 2 and 3 trials.

Hearts from donors with hepatitis C virus are safe for transplantation, and the recipients respond to HCV treatment after transplantation, according to data presented at the Annual Meeting and Scientific Sessions of the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation.

Results from a recent study showed that a multifaceted intervention including provider and patient education, electronic medical record-enabled best practice alert, and increased hepatitis C treatment capacity significantly increased hepatitis C screening.

Study findings published today in The New England Journal of Medicine demonstrated the safety of transplanting hearts and lungs from hepatitis C-positive donors into HCV-negative recipients.

The Louisiana Department of Health selected Asegua Therapeutics, a subsidiary of Gilead Sciences, as their pharmaceutical partner in a “subscription style” payment plan designed to provide state residents with access to hepatitis C treatment, according to a press release from the department.

“Typhus is not dead. It will live on for centuries and it will continue to break into the open whenever human stupidity and brutality give it a chance, as most likely they occasionally will.” – Hans Zinsser. The lure of infectious disease began with books (science fiction, noir detectives, Arrowsmith), but the hook was sex and drugs. While debating a life in philosophy or neuroscience (but for the slaughter of mice), I stumbled into volunteering at the Berkeley Free Clinic. Mentored by charismatics at the radical front of free health care and harm reduction with dignity, these teachers had weathered the Vietnam War, AIDS crisis and multiple injection-drug epidemics. To keep up and care for clients, I had to understand not only chlamydia, abscesses and hepatitis C, but also feminism, gay liberation, sex work, homelessness and criminal justice. The infections were a window into the vulnerabilities of our social immune system. At the University of California, San Francisco, my ID teachers varied widely in appearance and constitution, as well as where they would return after rounds: the laboratories, the clinics, phone meetings with WHO, the city’s public health department and the one attending who would stop by the freeway underpass to sit with one of her struggling patients. ID was the hopeful work of hopelessly tangled systems: global commerce and immunoglobulins; gender, power and negotiating condoms; heroin, the hospital venting systems and where the water flows. My ID mentors and colleagues continue to inspire and surprise me with endless curiosity, rigorous intellectual integrity and ferocious passion for doing the right thing. Typhus is not dead, nor are MRSA, HIV, or human brutality. I am grateful to be an ID physician who can draw on a rich history and community to push against these with vigor and compassion, immersed in the ambitious life’s work of sex, drugs and microbes.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs announced that it is on track to eliminate hepatitis C in all veterans willing and able to receive treatment within a timeframe of two months, according to a press release from the office.

Twelve weeks of combination Sovaldi and NS5A inhibitors without ribavirin was a reliable therapy with high rates of sustained virologic response for recurrent hepatitis C after liver transplantation, according to a study published in Hepatology.

Kidney transplant recipients with hepatitis B and hepatitis C in whom viral replication was controlled had similar overall and graft survival rates as patients without viral hepatitis, according to data published in Journal of Hepatology.

An analysis of patients with HIV who were being treated for hepatitis C virus infection found that 7% failed direct-acting antiviral therapy, and that mental illness and ongoing illicit drug use often predicted failure, researchers reported.