People from three major cities across the world have shared their stories on how the new hepatitis C treatment have changed their lives.
The interviewees from New York, Sydney and Zurich, told of how hepatitis C had affected them and how the shorter, side-effects free treatment turned their lives around.
Their stories put a human face to the world-wide campaign to make the new medicines more widely available. The video was produced by The Change Project, an initiative of the INHSU, through educational grants provided by AbbVie, Merck, BMS and Gilead.
Call from global hepatitis community
The world campaign for affordable hepatitis C treatment was given another push on 2 November when the World Hepatitis Alliance published a letter signed by 120 organisations from 55 countries calling on governments and pharmaceutical companies to improve access to life-saving drugs for viral hepatitis.
The letter, representing 400 million people living with hepatitis B and C, called on national governments to take all necessary steps to:
- Remove stigma that prevents people coming forward for testing
- Put in place adequate infrastructure and reduce the price of diagnostics so that they can screen at-risk populations
- Remove barriers and speed up the process of national registration of hepatitis drugs
- Reduce the price of the best hepatitis drugs to be able to massively scale up national treatment programs
The letter also urged pharmaceutical companies to:
- Ensure their drugs are affordable in all countries, including making the Intellectual Property of the best drugs available to the Medicines Patent Pool,
- Stop anti-diversion policies or using a dominant market position which prevent people accessing the best treatment available.
