- Thousands of middle-aged professionals who experimented
with drugs during their student days will be warned in a major government
health campaign this autumn that they may be infected with hepatitis C.
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- It is thought that up to 400,000 British people may be
carrying the potentially fatal virus without knowing it, because there
is such a long delay between infection and symptoms appearing.
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- Ministers have decided to go ahead with a national public
awareness campaign in September, warning that anyone who has ever injected
drugs, particularly sharing a needle, used straws to sniff cocaine or had
a blood transfusion before 1991, is at risk and should consider having
a blood test. However, they are worried about causing mass panic and want
to adopt a 'softly-softly' approach by focusing on the treatment available
for the disease, rather than its potential consequences.
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- The co-ordinators are hoping to find a celebrity who
has been infected with the virus to spearhead the campaign, but so far
those approached have declined publicity, such is the embarrassment associated
with the condition. The general public view about hepatitis C is that only
hardened drug addicts are at risk, but increasingly doctors are seeing
patients who have been infected after just one or two injections.
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- The virus is passed on through blood-to-blood contact,
and those at risk also include people who had a blood transfusion before
blood screening was brought in 13 years ago. Sexual transmission, tattooing
and piercing are the other possible methods of transmission.
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- At present only 2,000 people a year are treated for hepatitis
C on the NHS, but estimates of the numbers infected in the UK vary from
around 0.4 per cent of the population, some 240,000, to 1 per cent, some
600,000.
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- It is potentially fatal, but effective new antiviral
drugs can cure between 50 to 80 per cent of sufferers who have a chronic
form of the disease. Of those who carry hepatitis C, about 80 per cent
go on to develop a chronic infection in the liver, and about one-fifth
of these will develop serious liver disease.
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- However, many people do not know they are carriers until
they have serious symptoms such as severe liver pain. Many of those at
risk will be people who experimented with drugs in their youth. Charles
Gore, chief executive of the Hepatitis C Trust, said: 'How do you reach
the man on the street, who might have had a blood transfusion 20 years
ago, or who might have injected drugs in his youth. and warn him that he
could be wandering around with this virus?'
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- People can have the disease for 20 years or more before
they develop symptoms, which means those who experimented at college might
not realise the risks.
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- 'Typically, it might be someone who didn't know how to
inject drugs into the vein and who borrowed a syringe from someone who
was more experienced. The virus can then be passed directly into the bloodstream.'
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- Gore added: 'Between 1975 and 1985, in particular, there
was a huge experimentation with drugs. It was before the Aids crisis, no
one was aware of the dangers of blood-borne viruses, and many more were
injecting than was commonly supposed.'
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- Gore, who backs the government's efforts, says that Britain
is far behind other European countries in identifying patients. 'It is
hard to get people to admit that they might be at risk. It involves them
owning up to their past.'
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- The chair of the Department of Health's advisory group
on hepatitis, Professor Howard Thomas, re-iterated the warning that patients
don't have to be drug addicts to be at risk. 'Many of those infected will
be people in influential positions who dabbled with drugs years ago while
at college,' he told the Health Service Journal last week. While admitting
there is more to be done in making GPs aware of the disease, he said that
they have now taken the first steps in setting up a national system of
clinical centres for hepatology, or liver disease.
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- The first signs of the disease are not easy to spot.
They commonly include fatigue and aching joints, which are fairly usual
for people in their middle age. Patients also experience differing degrees
of pain. Some have a mild form of the virus and are in acute pain, others
have serious liver damage before they realise anything is wrong.
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- Ministers, highly aware of how the HIV campaign in the
Eighties scared a generation of people, want to take a more 'softly-softly'
approach. They started last week by sending out an action plan to all GPs
and health professionals.
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- A spokeswoman for the Department of Health would say
little about the campaign, other than to state that an outside consultancy
firm had been brought in to work on strategy. 'We will have a public awareness
campaign, but in order not to get people panicked, you have to do it in
stages, so the first stage is to make the professionals aware of the potential
problems.'
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004 http://www.guardian.co.uk/medicine/story/0,11381,1253765,00.html
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