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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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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Bringing Testing to Community

Moorundi Aboriginal Controlled Health Service will soon be offering hepatitis C point of care testing (POCT) to the community, along with its new Clean Needle Program (CNP) at the service’s Murray Bridge site. The initiative is part of a push to bring hepatitis rapid testing to regional South Australia,  under the umbrella of the world-first National Australia HCV Point of Care Testing Program (HCVPOCT).

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It’s Your Right in SA

New hep C testing/treatment campaign’s successes

The Eliminate Hepatitis C Australia Partnership (EC Australia) was created in 2018 to bring together researchers, scientists, government, health services and community organisations to work toward eliminating hepatitis C as a public health threat in Australia by 2030 (see last issue for more).

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Hepatitis and Children: Part 2 – Hepatitis B and C

In our last post we looked at the mysterious new form of hepatitis affecting young children. But what about hepatitis B and hepatitis C, which are already well known problems for thousands of Australians? How do they affect children?

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