Cash Reward for Hep C Treatment – What’s the Sweet Spot?

An innovative study is underway to explore whether paying someone a cash incentive would motivate them to start hepatitis C treatment, and if it does, what level of payment is right. The study will also look at whether paying a GP to prescribe hepatitis C treatment will increase treatment initiation rate.

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Community News at 100 – A Look Back

Before social media and online chat, there were newsletters. People read them, wrote letters to the editor and contributed essays. That’s when our Community News was born – back in 1997, as a platform for discussion and sharing knowledge – part of a nascent hepatitis C information and support service.

Come February 2024, the Community News publishes its 100th issue. In this retrospective, we take a look at how the publication has evolved over the years.

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Guide to Liver Cancer Control

The elimination of hepatitis B and hepatitis C is one of the key strategies outlined in a set of guidelines addressing the alarming rise of liver cancer cases and associated deaths in Australia. Titled the Roadmap to Liver Cancer Control in Australia, other actions recommended in the plan include community awareness raising, and the improvement of access and support to services for communities at higher risk of liver cancer.

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Hepatitis C Drug Resistance

Direct-acting antiviral drugs (DAAs) to treat hepatitis C have proven to be a spectacular success, being able to cure more than 95% of people who have been living with the virus. However, a growing issue has implications for the design of future DAAs, and that is the ability of the hepatitis C virus–like all viruses–to mutate. Mutant versions of viruses can “learn” to defeat the medications used to treat them by changing their structure or the way they interact with the bodies they infect.

When they help the virus evade the effects of medication, we call these changes “drug resistance mutations” (DRMs), and they can make it much harder to cure infections. When a drug-resistant version of a virus becomes the dominant one, it can make a previously useful drug completely ineffective.

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Waking to a New Life

Maureen Cook went from worrying about how long she had to live to planning for a whole new life. It only took her 23 years.

“I found out I had hepatitis C in 2000 when a diligent and insightful GP decided to test me for it after she discovered I had hepatitis B back in 1975. I’d cleared the hep B then and didn’t think about it anymore. Didn’t know I had hep C,” she recalled.

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Asia-Pacific Consensus

Hep Can’t Wait is the international campaign launched by the World Hepatitis Alliance in 2021. Its aim is to highlight the social injustice and inequity caused by the current lack of action on hepatitis elimination, and focus on the positive action needed to meet the world’s 2030 hepatitis elimination goals.

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