New Zealand Hepatitis C Blog May 2010

World Hepatitis Day, May 19, aims to raise global awareness of hepatitis B and hepatitis C and encourage prevention, diagnosis and treatment.
World Hepatitis Day is led by the World Hepatitis Alliance, which represents 200 patients groups and organizations
http://www.worldhepatitisday.org/en/Home.aspx

The Hepatitis Comics

Have a laugh with Lucinda K. Porter ‘s blog The Hepatitis Comics. Lucinda is hepatitis C positive and positively believes in the power of humour.

http://hepatitiscomics.blogspot.com/

Medical transmission of Hepatitis C from Australia

VICTORIANS worried about their contact with Dr James Latham Peters over the past four years should contact health authorities – not just patients of the doctor in 2008 and 2009, as first stated last week.

A spokesman for the Department of Health last night confirmed that Dr Peters had worked at Croydon Day Surgery – the clinic where he allegedly infected 12 patients with his own strain of hepatitis C – since 2006.

On Friday, Victoria’s chief health officer, Dr John Carnie, said the infected patients had visited the clinic between June 2008 and December last year, and that patients worried about their contact with him at the Croydon clinic during this period should contact the department.

He said departmental workers were also trying to contact patients they believed to be at risk of contracting the blood-borne virus from him during this 18-month period.

But the department spokesman last night said authorities would also encourage patients who visited Dr Peters at Croydon Day Surgery as far back as 2006 to seek further information from the department if they were worried about the virus.

As of last night, the department had received 830 calls from people with questions about the anaesthetist, who is believed to have been using drugs when he infected patients with his particular strain of the illness.

Last week, Dr Carnie said he referred the matter to police in March because he found it hard to imagine how the transmission of the virus had been accidental.

http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/officials-welcome-hepatitis-c-feedback-20100412-s4dx.html

Being Warehoused

‘Warehoused : when patients elect to wait for the new drugs’
Warehoused : Thought this was interesting about waiting for new treatments, I think you might have to wait extra long for pharmac to fund a new treatment in New Zealand. So maybe prepare to be in your warehouse with hep c for a long time ?

Hepatitis C Patients May Boost Merck, J&J, Vertex

http://www.businessweek.com

By Michelle Fay Cortez and Naomi Kresge

April 19 (Bloomberg) — At Fred Poordad’s bustling hepatitis C clinic in the heart of Los Angeles, one in every five patients receives no treatment. They are waiting for a wave of new drugs, expected in the next 18 months, that may boost their chance at a cure by as much as 10-fold.

They’re just the first among new therapies anticipated in the next five years as companies seek a single pill to cure the infection. Poordad, chief of hepatology at the Liver Disease and Transplant Center at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, doesn’t object when his patients elect to wait for the new drugs, a practice known as “warehousing.”

“The warehousing has been going on for the past year or so,” Poordad said. “I think we’ll see a tremendous increase in the volume of patients that are treated. That’s the most exciting thing in the field for a long time.”

The drugs closest to market, Merck’s boceprevir and telaprevir from Vertex and Johnson & Johnson, are protease inhibitors crafted from the technologies that led to discoveries made in the fight against HIV. The new treatments are being tested as additions to current standard treatments. Both drugs work by blocking the action of the protease enzyme the hepatitis virus needs to replicate, directly stopping it from spreading.

Warehoused better than a wallet biopsy………….

Telaprevir, has had a trial here in NZ recently, with another trial coming soon.

Adding the investigational drug telaprevir to standard treatment for hepatitis C infection cures about half the patients willing to give therapy a second try. That compares to a cure rate of just 14 percent among those who were re-treated with the standard regimen, according to researchers at Duke Clinical Research Institute.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwKJQgkdJ2s&feature=player_embedded

Happy Hepatitis month

best of Health

www.hcv.org.nz