![]() ![]() Some patients may also need an ultrasound. If a rapid test comes back positive, more blood work is needed to check whether it is a current infection or old antibodies. Getting through the steps to the cure can nonetheless be an obstacle course for patients, especially if they have no transportation or time off to head to a clinic, or fear leaving belongings behind at a homeless encampment. But once they’ve treated their first patient and they get that sense of, ‘Oh, my gosh, I just cured someone and it was so easy,’ then they become advocates.” Many mistakenly believe assessing patients for the treatment is complicated, and “it’s so hard to get them in the door. ![]() Norah Terrault, chief of gastroenterology and liver diseases at Keck, who founded a program to teach primary care physicians about treating the illness. It’s simpler than hypertension,” said Dr. Treating hepatitis C is now “simpler than diabetes. Sonia Canzater, director of the Hepatitis Policy Project at the O’Neill Institute, said some doctors may have enduring memories of the earlier, much more complicated treatments, which “came with a myriad of side effects.” Many primary care doctors still shunt hepatitis patients to specialists unnecessarily, experts said. In January 2022, California started requiring clinics and other primary care providers to routinely offer screenings for hepatitis C and follow-up care to those who test positive, but Gounder questioned whether the requirement was being widely followed, since “there’s no enforcement behind it.” The California Department of Public Health said it did not know what percentage of Californians with the virus had obtained antiviral treatment. At the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, programs to combat all forms of viral hepatitis get under $1 million in grant funding annually for HIV, the county department receives nearly $100 million in grants annually, Gounder said. Or then they go to some doctors - and the doctors don’t know how to treat them.”Įxperts also said there is scant funding to address the virus compared with other public health threats. “In reality, we know that many people don’t have a doctor, or it’s too difficult to get access to a doctor. Jeffrey Klausner, an infectious disease specialist at USC’s Keck School of Medicine. “For the past 10 years, the strategy has been, ‘OK, let’s get those people to their doctor,’” said Dr. Prabhu Gounder, medical director of the viral hepatitis and respiratory diseases unit at the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health. When the new medications emerged, health systems like Kaiser Permanente Southern California and Veterans Affairs could reach out to members who were diagnosed with the condition and offer them the pills, but “there’s just no way to do something like that with the Medicaid population,” said Dr. Babies can also get it at birth from an infected mother, and the virus can also spread through unsanitary tattooing or sharing blood-contaminated items such as razors. It can spread through shared needles or other equipment for injecting drugs, which the CDC describes as the main cause of new infections experts have estimated upward of 40% of people who inject drugs have hepatitis C. The virus was not identified until 1989, which meant that some people became infected through blood transfusions or other exposure before the threat was understood. One national study spanning 2011 to 2016 found that less than half of people infected with the virus were aware. Nearly half of them had no idea, the study found.Īcross the country, millions of people are believed to have hepatitis C, but many do not know it. A UCLA study published more than a decade ago found that more than a quarter of unhoused adults on L.A.’s skid row were infected. The virus has disproportionately hit marginalized groups, including people who inject drugs, have been incarcerated or are homeless. ![]()
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