Thursday, May 19, 2016

Hepatitis C is Killing Americans in Record Numbers While Patients Cannot Access Life Saving Medicine

Hepatitis C is Killing Americans in Record Numbers While Patients Cannot Access Life Saving Medicine
David Rein

According to the CDC and reported recently by Lena Sun in the Washington Post, Hepatitis C now kills more people annually than the next 60 reportable infectious diseases combined, and, yes, the list of the next 60 infectious diseases includes HIV. In fact, hepatitis C has been killing more Americans than HIV since 2007, a fact the CDC first reported in 2012. That hepatitis C deaths set a new record in 2014 is not surprising. Hepatitis C deaths have set new records in every year since at least 2003, but the continued rise is alarming given that the vast majority of these deaths are preventable with the wide range of treatments now available.

In 2010, my NORC colleague John Wittenborn and I, along with CDC coauthors (none of whom have reviewed this post - the post reflects my thoughts alone), shopped a paper forecasting the mortality we are seeing today to three major American medical journals...



No comments:

Post a Comment