When treatment, and everything else, goes wrong: David’s story

I have been reading the Hepatitis SA Community News for a long time, perhaps since its inception! I have always been interested to read other people’s stories of living with hep C. The time has come for me to tell my tale.

I have been living with the hep C virus for over 30 years, contracting it some time in the mid-to-late ‘80s. In my late teens and early twenties I discovered that injecting various drugs was a wonderful form of escape. My need to obliterate myself during this period was the result of having been sexually abused in my early teens by the leader of a NSW Church of England Boys Society group.

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New Liver Cancer Marker Promises Earlier Diagnosis and Better Outcomes

Australian researchers have found a way to predict the risk of liver cancer in people with chronic hepatitis B, promising earlier diagnosis, better management and potentially better prevention of hepatitis B- related liver cancer.

For some time now scientists have known that when the hepatitis B virus (HBV) replicates it leaves behind bits of its DNA in string form, different to its original circular shape. They refer to this as “splicing”. They also noticed that higher viral load results in more splicing; and retrospective examination of blood samples showed that splicing increased each year prior to the development of liver cancer.

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