Hepatitis C virus
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The overwhelming majority of people within the U.S. who test positive for hepatitis C have not been cured attributable to the high cost of oral antiviral treatments and obstacles imposed by insurance policy, federal health officials said Thursday.
Hepatitis C is also known as the silent killer because the initial infection has few or no symptoms. Extra time, nonetheless, the virus may cause liver damage, liver cancer, liver failure, and ultimately death.
The virus is spread through contact with the blood of an infected person, mainly through shared needles and other equipment used to inject drugs.
Groundbreaking oral antiviral therapies made by Teachings of Gilead AND abbvie have been present on the American market for almost a decade. Taken once a day for eight to 12 weeks, these pills cure greater than 95% of cases of hepatitis C.
Despite the supply of these drugs, only a 3rd of the 1 million U.S. adults who tested positive for hepatitis C between 2013 and 2022 were cured, in keeping with a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report released Thursday. Health officials estimate that as much as one million individuals are infected within the US, but they do not know they’ve the virus.
Based on the CDC, hepatitis C contributed to the deaths of nearly 15,000 people in 2020.
“1000’s of people die every yr in our country, and plenty of more suffer from an infection that has been treatable for greater than 10 years,” Dr. Jonathan Mermin, director of the CDC’s HIV and hepatitis division, told reporters Thursday.
The Biden administration has asked Congress to approve $11 billion to fund a national program to eliminate hepatitis C by 2030. Dr. Francis Collins, who leads the initiative on the White House, said this system would save 1000’s of lives and pay for itself by lowering healthcare costs.
Medical insurance and hepatitis care costs
Health officials said the predominant obstacles to treatment are requirements imposed by medical health insurance plans and the high cost of treatment. A course of pills can cost as much as $24,000 per patient.
Dr. Carolyn Wester, who heads the CDC’s hepatitis division, said some health insurers require cumbersome pre-authorization before patients can receive the pills and likewise limit which health care providers can prescribe medications.
Collins, who was previously director of the National Institutes of Health, said local health centers that treat the uninsured cannot afford pills for everyone. Based on the CDC, only one in 4 uninsured adults diagnosed with hepatitis C are cured.
Even state Medicaid plans impose burdensome requirements similar to proof of liver disease, sobriety and specialist involvement, Collins told reporters on Thursday. Based on the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the high cost of drugs makes it difficult for Medicaid to treat everyone who is infected.
Under Biden’s proposal, the federal government would pay drug corporations like Gilead and Abbvie a lump sum for the drugs. The businesses would then make the drugs available for free to uninsured state Medicaid programs, prison systems, and folks living on Native American reservations.
The proposal builds on a model introduced by Louisiana in 2019, through which the state paid Gilead subsidiary Asegua Therapeutics a lump sum for enough drugs over five years to treat nearly all Medicaid patients and incarcerated people.
Collins said the NIH and the Food and Drug Administration are also working to approve a hepatitis C rapid test that will provide a diagnosis in an hour or less. He said the test can be used to diagnose and treat patients in a single visit.