Over 2 million co-infected with HIV, hepatitis C

Of these, more than half, or 1.3 million, are people who inject drugs (PWID) -- HIV infections caused by injecting drugs.

The study revealed that HIV-infected people are on an average six times more likely than HIV-uninfected people to have HCV infection.

The study shows that not only are people with HIV at much higher risk of HCV infection, groups such as people who inject drugs have extremely high prevalence of HCV infection - over 80 percent.

HIV and HCV infections are major global public health problems, with overlapping modes of transmission and affected populations.

Globally, there are 37 million people infected with HIV and around 115 million people with chronic HCV infection.

Improvement in the surveillance of HCV and HIV is imperative to help define the epidemiology of coinfection and inform appropriate policies for testing, prevention, care and treatment to those in need.

The study shows the need to scale up prevention interventions, such as needle and syringe programmes and opioid substitution therapy, as well as access to HIV and HCV treatment, to reduce morbidity and new infections, the researchers suggested.

The study, published online in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, systematically reviewed 783 medical studies from worldwide sources to build the first global estimates on the prevalence of HIV/HCV co-infection (measured by HCV antibody) as a public health problem. 

Hepatitis C treatment that brought happiness back to my married life

Article by Mr. Gyan Sagar

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Hepatitis c disease is a very dangerous disease. When i came to know that my second wife who is pregnant. I had gone in rajendra nagar hospital on the date 18/10/2013 in rajendra nagar to meet Dr. Sunita Chandra. She write in her prescription for medical test & when i got the medical report it said my wife is  Hepatitis C Positive

After I got this medical report, i had become so disturbed i also had a fight with my wife that her family fooled me that her family did not tell me about this disease & her family had done wronged me and now i will not sustain this relationship. I sent my wife to her village. After that i had decided that i will not make this relation on a/c of  HCV!

But after some time i made a call to my Ustadji who is my best friend. He advised me Mr. Gyan, if you have the same disease, “what will be your decision!” i had got my answer that i was wrong there!

After that i started to search on internet  for hepatitis C treatment & i made a call to my wife to come back to my home. I told her that I will give her the treatment after that once again i try to retest may be medical report was  incorrect!

But once again i had got medical report HCV Positive. After some time i found a website for Kamalahar. It was an ayurvedic medicine for six month course. I had ordered to the owner of website kindly send me this medicine. He told me I will have to deposit the money in their account after that they will send the medicine. When i paid him the medicine came after one week later. All medicine had come to my residence. He advised me after 3 month later we will get the HCV result Negative in medical test. After that i had started the treatment of my wife. Today 02/06/2014 when Dr. Mitali Das Saha told me that a long period has become passed and advised me to do the test of Anti HCV.

  After that i had gone Care Dignostic for this test and after one day i got the report.

 I came to know then anti HCV result has come NON REACTIVE & her illness has finished i am so much surprised. Because doctor advised me for anti HCV test also  so i  do this test & my report also come NON REACTIVE.

I had never thought that her illness will finished in a very small period but god is great.

Hepatitis C fully cured by 8 months treatment through ayurvedic medicine Kamalahar

Ashish Das, a resident of West Bengal, was suffering from Hepatitis C. Ashish was in a bad condition when he was admitted to Apollo Hospital in Kolkata. He was bleeding from nose, mouth, etc. Doctors told him that he will not survive for more than 1 month and discharged him from hospital saying that they can’t do any anything. His brother-in-law found out about Kamalahar through internet and bought it for him. Mr. Ashish started taking Kamalahar and after 6 months of treatment with Kamalahar, he was feeling much better. He went back to his doctor and they did the tests and told him that he is healthy now and his liver is in much better condition. Since he was feeling better now, the doctors also suggested that he should also take Exxura along with Kamalahar. After 2 more months of Kamalahar along with Exxura, he got fully cured of hepatitis C and is now hepatitis negative. He has also started going back to work.

Doctors Push to Screen Baby Boomers for Hepatitis C

Millions of healthy baby boomers in USA may get a surprising request at future doctor visits: Get tested for hepatitis C, the potentially fatal liver virus commonly thought to affect mostly intravenous drug users.

A small minority of boomers are thought to suffer from the disease. But momentum is building to have more than 60 million screened because of easier testing methods and less harmful and more effective treatment.

Called a "silent epidemic," hepatitis C affects roughly 3.2 million people in the U.S., though at least half of those infected don't know it, health officials say. Often, symptoms don't appear until dangerous complications like cirrhosis or cancer have already occurred. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention attributes 16,600 deaths to hepatitis C in 2010, the most recent year for which data is available. Many could have been avoided had patients been diagnosed and treated earlier.

Boomers—people born in the U.S. between 1945 and 1965—are more likely to suffer from hepatitis C than others. The reasons: high rates of experimental drug use in the 1960s and 1970s, and lack of oversight given to the blood supply used in all transfusions before 1992, officials say. Boomers, now in their late 40s to late 60s, may not realize they have been exposed to potentially infected blood. Many people may not know if they had a blood transfusion even if they know they had a car accident and went to the hospital decades ago.

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, an influential medical guidelines body, recommended in June that people born between 1945 and 1965 be offered screenings. Under the Affordable Care Act, the recommendation means that most private health insurers must now pay the full costs of screening at no out-of-pocket cost to patients. State Medicaid programs that cover the cost of screenings recommended by the task force receive extra funding under the ACA.

The price of initial hepatitis C testing ranges up to $200 and additional tests may be required.

New York last week became the first state to enact a law requiring that boomers be offered screening when they see a doctor or enter the hospital. If a person test negative, he/she can have peace of mind and if found positive then he/she can get the care they need.

Some physicians who plan to follow the task force's recommendation said they worry it could become burdensome. Doctor visits tend to be short, and older patients can have a raft of health risks that require attention. Ensuring that optional screening is offered to patients will be a challenge, health officials acknowledge. Electronic medical records may help.

With increased screening, however, comes the risk that many people will receive expensive, unneeded treatment or suffer undue pain through testing procedures. The majority of people with hepatitis C will never suffer liver damage and ultimately die of other causes. Until recently, that kept officials from recommending screening to people without known risk factors, such as sharing needles during drug use or having received blood transfusions or organ transplants before 1992. It's possible to contract the disease through sex, though uncommon.

Advances in treatment and minimally invasive diagnostics have started to change the risk-benefit calculation. In the past, biopsies were common for people who tested positive for the virus. The procedure can cause severe pain, bleeding or infection in 1% of patients and, more rarely, death. Liver biopsies have become less common with the development of blood tests capable of detecting liver scarring.

Looming hepatitis C crisis in Canada

When Cynthia was about to turn 40 earlier this year, her doctor ordered a battery of tests – including a blood test for hepatitis C. Cynthia, a Canadian resident, said she was shocked when the results confirmed that she had antibodies for hepatitis C.

Cynthia has no idea how she contracted the virus: She has never received a blood transfusion or medical attention in a foreign country, and never experimented with injection drugs, she said. Doctors suggested there was a slim chance she was infected via dental work or sharing a toothbrush. According to her, if she can get this, anyone can.

Hepatitis C is sometimes seen as a drug addict’s disease, but recent data suggest the largest group of Canadians carrying the virus consists of average adults born between 1945 and 1975. Last year, evidence of high infection rates among boomers prompted the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to recommend that all adults born between 1945 and 1965 be tested and treated for hepatitis C before this latent disease becomes a health crisis.

That testing guideline was supported by the Canadian Liver Foundation, which expanded the birth year to 1975 “due to the prevalence of hepatitis C in the immigrant population,”.