Hepatitis C conference  Whakatane 2010

Past Failures and New Solutions in Hepatitis B and C control in New Zealand and the Asia Pacific region
Tariana Turia – NZ Viral Hepatitis Conference 2010

Tuatahi me mihi atu ki te mana whenua. Tena koutou o Mataatua waka. Tena hoki koutou o nga mata waka kua whakarauika nei i raro i te karanga o te ra

Tena koutou i runga i te rangimarie. Tena koutou i runga i nga maharatanga mo ratou kua wheturangitia.

No reira, tena tatou katoa

I want to thank the Hepatitis Foundation of New Zealand for the honour of being invited to open this third New Zealand Viral Hepatitis Conference.

I acknowledge the local people of this rohe, and I thank them for their generosity in hosting us here in Whakatane.

I extend a particular welcome to our international guests:

* Professor Mitchell Shiffman from the United States;
* Professor Andrew Lloyd from Australia;
* Dr Morris Sherman from Canada and
* Dr James Fung from Hong Kong.

While both Hepatitis B and C viruses are notifiable conditions under the Health Act, it is only cases of acute infection which require to be notified to the Medical Officer of Health.

Alongside with the lack of awareness that comes from being asymptomatic; people with hepatitis may experience stigma and discrimination which compounds the problems of living with the virus.

So the call to do better is an important one.

We must continue to raise awareness, leading to increased testing and diagnosis.
Well spoken words from Tariana Turia

Life after liver transplant

Hi, This is my first post of my Video Diary following my Liver Transplant and my continued fight against my Hepatitis C infection/virus. Just a quick one to saay hello – I’ve never done video before and so let’s hope for all our sakes that I get better at it soon!

Please check out my blog: http://www.ianquill.blogspot.com – Thanks for watching…. Ian Quill

Hepatitis C Drug Trails NZ March 2010

Four drug trials for Hepatitis C in New Zealand at the moment (March 2010)
http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?term=hepatitis+c+New+zealand&recr=Open
1, TMC435-TiDP16-C206: A Safety and Efficacy Study in Chronic, Genotype 1, Hepatitis C Patients That Failed Previous Standard Treatment

2,  A Safety and Efficacy Study of the Combination of VX-222 and Telaprevir in Treatment-Naïve Subjects With Genotype 1 Chronic Hepatitis C Virus Infection

3, Safety and Tolerability Study of Clemizole Hydrochloride to Treat Hepatitis C in Subjects Who Are Treatment-Naive

4, Antiviral Activity of AZD7295 in HCV Carriers

Doctor  Magdalena Harris

thesis is available online now

Negotiating the pull of the normal: embodied narratives of living with hepatitis C in New Zealand and Australia (2010)
Harris, Magdalena , National Centre In HIV Social Research, Faculty Of Arts & Social Sciences, UNSW
My status as a person living with hepatitis C informed all aspects of this research project; I therefore also include my own experiences, foregrounding researcher reflexivity and the co-constructed nature of the interview process.

“ My aims are both practical and theoretical. On a practical level I explore the experiences of people living with hepatitis C in order to inform recommendations for policy, research and practice, while also working to elucidate and employ an approach that allows for an analysis of the ill body as a lived experiencing agent, located in a substantive web of connections whereby discourse, corporeality and sociality, inform and mediate one another. To this end I employ a “political phenomenology” influenced by phenomenological and poststructuralist theoretical approaches. The central, previously under-researched, issues that arose in participants’ narratives structure the chapter outline, with results chapters focusing on participants’ experiences of diagnosis, living with hepatitis C, stigma, support group membership, alcohol use, and hepatitis C treatment.

For many participants, it was found that living with hepatitis C was a liminal experience where distinctions between what it was to be healthy or ill were not clear-cut. Indeed, many of the participants’ narratives exposed the inadequacy of Western binary categorisations to speak to their experiences of living with hepatitis C. Throughout this thesis it can be seen that the meanings that participants ascribed to health, illness, and their hepatitis C were fluid and contextual, informed by the interplay of corporeality and discourse. From this interplay comes the ability to speak into the gaps of dominant discourses, creating the potential for the disruption, or subtle realignment, of normative ways of knowing. “
Download  your copy here
http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/unsworks:7899

Congratulations  Dr Harris from all your peers.

The best of health
www.hcv.org.nz