Via The Globe and Mail: Report calls for hepatitis C testing of Canadian boomers. The CMAJ article mentioned is behind a paywall. Excerpt:
A team of liver specialists joined the chorus of Canadian experts calling for a national strategy to diagnose and treat hepatitis C in Canada’s baby-boomer population, in a report published Monday in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.
“Hepatitis C is clearly underdiagnosed and undertreated throughout North America,” said co-author Dr. Jordan Feld, a hepatologist at the Toronto Western Hospital Liver Centre. “This is a curable infection,” he added, “but most people don’t know they have it.”
Individuals with hepatitis C typically show no symptoms until they develop advanced liver disease – usually decades after they are infected. By that stage, Feld said, “sometimes the only option is a liver transplant.”
If the virus is detected early, current treatments can cure about 60 per cent of patients diagnosed with hepatitis C. But Feld predicts that better treatments with an estimated cure rate of at least 90 per cent will be available by the end of 2014. Drug treatments are far more cost-effective than liver transplants over the long term, he added: “We’re just at the cusp of having all these new therapies, so it makes sense to start treating people now.”
As the Globe and Mail reported in September, an estimated one in 33 baby boomers in Canada is infected with hepatitis C. Due to high infection rates in boomers as well as immigrants, the Canadian Liver Foundation recommended in 2012 that all Canadians born between 1945 and 1975 be tested for the virus.
