Welcome to HCV Advocate’s hepatitis blog. The intent of this blog is to keep our website audience up-to-date on information about hepatitis and to answer some of our web site and training audience questions. People are encouraged to submit questions and post comments.

For more information on how to use this blog, the HCV drug pipeline, and for more information on HCV clinical trials
click here

Be sure to check out our other blogs: The HBV Advocate Blog and Hepatitis & Tattoos.


Alan Franciscus

Editor-in-Chief

HCV Advocate



Showing posts with label new testing guidelines. Show all posts
Showing posts with label new testing guidelines. Show all posts

Thursday, August 6, 2015

World Hepatitis Day: The transformation and enduring struggles of HCV treatment

In August 2012, the big news in the hepatitis community was a new set of CDC guidelines recommending that all Baby Boomers (those born between 1945 and 1965) receive a hepatitis C test. According to the CDC, at that time, more than two million U.S. baby boomers were infected with hepatitis C (HCV), representing approximately 75% of all HCV-infected individuals and the vast majority of the 15,000 people who would die of HCV-related causes that year.

The goal of universal testing for this age cohort was to help identify more than 800,000 additional HCV-infected individuals, who had not yet been diagnosed.

A lot has changed in the last two and a half years. "With the new treatments, people are excited about being treated and cured," Alan Franciscus, founder and executive director of the Hepatitis C Support Project and editor-in-chief of the HCV Advocate, told BioPharma Dive in an interview. "Prior to the approval of interferon-free therapies, there was usually a reluctance from patients—maybe a better word is fear—of treatment."

Read more...