11 ms·
England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C
- jmclnx 2mo ago[flagged]
- stevenwoo 2mo agoMy reading of the article was aggressive response by single payer healthcare (i.e. NHS) is responsible so that would be almost impossible politically in USA as long as senate exists on top of non scientific medical authorities.
- renegade-otter 2mo agoThe Senate? He just issued an executive order overriding all science. It's a total farce at this point.
- stevenwoo 2mo agoThat's true, I was recollecting when we had somewhat ordinary politics in USA and Affordable Care Act passed when Democrats had majority in Senate but making it single payer was stopped by purported Democrat Joe Leiberman.
- Tangurena2 2mo agoAlso politically impossible is that Congress made it illegal for state/federal health plans (Medicaid for poor folks and Medicaid for old folks) to negotiate prices with drug companies. Which is why it can cost $95k for a Hep C treatment in the US. It is my understanding that NHS negotiated a price around £3k for the same treatment.
- Denatonium 2mo agoHonestly, Mehmet Oz deserves more of the blame here. He and the other people who are fighting to make healthcare expensive and inaccessible create situations where people aren't being diagnosed and cured of Hep C, which leaves them passing the infection to others through sexual contact, sharing needles, etc. RFK Jr. is an anti-vax crackpot, but Hep C isn't vaccine-preventable. On the other hand, we can absolutely blame RFK Jr. for our rising Hep A, B, and D rates.
- moralestapia 2mo agoCare to elaborate? What has RFK Jr specifically said for/against HepC?
- JSR_FDED 2mo agoI think the OP is extrapolating from the rise in measles cases under RFK Jr’s expert leadership
- moralestapia 2mo agoLet OP explain xirself.
- LastTrain 2mo agoAs you seem to be someone rushing out to defend RFKjr - what are some good things about him? What don’t you like?
- moralestapia 2mo agoI have zero idea about who RFK Jr is or what it does, aside from him being the US Secretary of Health, a country of which I am neither a citizen or resident.
- LastTrain 2mo agoWell then it is exceptionally weird for you to ask what it said about hepC yeah?
- jmclnx 2mo agoTrump just issued an order reducing childhood vaccines, plus there is a Hep C vaccine which is being ignored by the CDC. Never mind the resurgence of many childhood diseases thanks to RFK jr and Trump. I do not know why some people think the current US regime will follow England with all evidence pointing to doing the exact opposite.
- 2mo ago
- alistairSH 2mo agoInteresting that it's just England (and not Scotland, Wales, or NI). I realize they all have independent NHSs, but still would assume a program like this would rolled out across all the constituent countries.
- beejiu 2mo agoEach country also has their own Public Health bodies, so pretty much everything related to health is devolved
- alistairSH 2mo agoYes, that's what I said - each is named "NHS [country]" (National Health Service [England | Scotland | etc]).
- beejiu 2mo agoSplitting hairs, but the public health bodies are separate from the National Health Services (so there exists Public Health England _and_ NHS England). Public health is slightly different to healthcare, but of course they work together. Oddly, Public Health Scotland is part of NHS Scotland; but Public Health England is not part of NHS England, it's a parallel department.
- alistairSH 2mo agoGotcha, clearly I know just enough about the UK government to prove how little I know about the UK government. :) I'm British by birth (well, UAE, but they don't do jus soli), but been in the US since kindergarten and naturalized since college.
- alibarber 2mo agoI wouldn't have assumed this really because really the whole point of devolution is that they get to choose what to prioritise, so perhaps the other nations choose to do something they consider to be more pressing for their populations.
- iLoveOncall 2mo ago[flagged]
- vlovich123 2mo ago> The target of treating 80% of all known cases has already been met, and deaths from the virus have fallen by 36% in the last decade, just short of what is needed by 2030. Taking antiviral tablets for 8 to 12 weeks can cure more than 95% of cases. So indeed diagnosing the cases is leading directly to deaths prevented.
- shevy-java 2mo ago> So indeed diagnosing the cases is leading directly to deaths prevented. This is not what the title claims. The title claims that hepatitis C is to be eliminated, aka 0%. This is not possible; anyone with a basic 101 virology knows why. BBC lies here via the title.
- noelwelsh 2mo agoYou seem to think there is some kind of conspiracy at play. The BBC is simply using the terminology used by the professionals who deal with this.
- Citizen_Lame 2mo agoIt's just legalise phrasing, still a good news. Saldy we lost measles eradication status, and tuberculosis might be lost as well soon.
- lbriner 2mo agoElimination doesn't mean there are no incidences of it, it means no new cases diagnosed in England. This is a result of reducing the cases so much that the chance of catching it drops to virtually zero. Drug users have a range of cleaner alternatives today than 10 years ago so is less of an issue but also if very few people have it, the chance of a drug user sharing a needle with someone who has becomes very small indeed.
- renegade-otter 2mo agoGood for you. We get explosive diarrhea as the prize in the States. Wanna trade?
- noir_lord 2mo agoNah we are good - We have our problems (including our own version of your guy but he hasn't won yet and is currently running against a man with a bin on his head) but on the whole, nah we are good.
- sizzzzlerz 2mo agoWell, then, we can offer you measles, instead. How's that? We're also working on bringing back polio and smallpox. Think of it as our contribution to FREEDOM!
- tialaramex 2mo agoFarage isn't quite the same and of course the situation is rather different. The three jobs are divided up differently, though still between too few people. You have a Figurehead, the Head of State, which here is King Charles and in the US is Donald Trump. That's the part Trump most likes, you get free gold stuff, you're allowed to do whatever you please, everybody is supposed to suck up to you, hooray. Farage would not get that job. Next you've got Executive leader. Trump doesn't enjoy this as much. People keep trying to blame him for the fact he's bad at it. He appointed people he saw on TV to run things, how is it his fault they're not brilliant? This would be half of Farage's job as Prime Minister and he likes being asked to account for his incompetence even less than Trump. Finally Head of the Legislature, in the US this isn't Trump's job, Mike Johnson is in the House and John Thune in the Senate. Farage would get this job in full as the Prime Minister. Even before he resigned he was rarely actually in Westminster, it's boring and you need to be good at actual politics, so of course he's not there, he gets paid more to be somewhere else. I also don't think Nigel can put together the numbers. Trump has Mike and John to try to make the numbers work, and Farage wouldn't have that. "My way or the highway" is what Farage would say, and that doesn't make the numbers work. That's how you lose a Confidence motion and you're back on your arse in six weeks. [Edited to correct the Senate leader, mistake pointed out by ragnese below]
- kandros 2mo ago[flagged]
- wowczarek 2mo agoThis is actually a good idea for a HN dataset toy: replace all plausibly confusable words in HN headlines with the names of programming languages.
- frollogaston 2mo agoHepatitis C sounds like a dialect of C
- nailer 2mo agoTo be fair Erlang is written in Erlang and before that Prolog, so the Erlang community may indeed view C as Hepatitis.
- zelphirkalt 2mo agoJust to understand this: When someone says "country England", do they mean "country" like in "nation", considering England a separate nation, or is it a lapse and they mean UK? Is England usually referred to as a country, or just part of a country? I usually think of a country as equal to a nation, and as far as I know, Wales and Scotland have not split off yet? Is the term "country" not actually that sharply defined? EDIT: Thanks people, I just asked a question to better understand the terminology, you know ...
- llm_nerd 2mo agoEngland is a country, and if you're reading this on the BBC they most certainly are using the correct terminology. It is not a sovereign country, but instead is a part of the constituents comprising the UK state.
- zelphirkalt 2mo agoOK, so now we have the following terms: State, nation, country, sovereign country. For example in Germany one would say there are 16 states, but one wouldn't say that there are 16 countries. Never heard anyone claim that. So state seems to be different from country, at least here. Would people in the UK say that Scotland or Wales are "nations"? Or is at least that term very clearly only for units that could participate under a flag in lets say the olympics? (I assume here, that Scotland and Wales are not separately competing, but are under UK flag.)
- tialaramex 2mo ago"And by 'country' we mean a sovereign state that is a member of the UN in its own right" to quote the famous UK Quiz Show "Pointless". Team GB enters the Olympics but as you may have noticed it was England who came Third in the World Cup recently, and likewise England play international rugby, including against Wales and Scotland.
- M2Ys4U 2mo ago
- Cockbrand 2mo agoSo will it be replaced by Hepatitis Rust for memory safety? (I'm sorry, and I'll see myself out, thanks)
- ericcholis 2mo agoTake your upvote...not happy about it....but here
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- shevy-java 2mo agoThe title shows a lack of understanding. BBC has become really low quality.
- Aflynn50 2mo agoWhat do you mean by this? The article quotes an NHS director backing up the statement in the title. > England is now leading the world in the mission to eliminate this disease and on course to beat the WHO's 2030 target, but we are determined to keep up the momentum and finish the job. Seems fairly unambiguous to me
- gertop 2mo agoThere is a lack of understanding, but it's coming from you not the BBC. There is a difference between elimination and eradication. As usual you fail to understand nuance.
- rob_c 2mo agoThere's also a difference between treatment and cure but we call it all a "vaccine" now (I prefer the transitional OED definition from pre 2019). We've already entered 1984s use of good speak especially around healthcare.
- ck2 2mo ago[flagged]
- alanning 2mo agoNot sure if they edited the article after you read it but this is the 3rd paragraph now: “Taking antiviral tablets for 8 to 12 weeks can cure more than 95% of cases.”
- s0rce 2mo agoYou take antivirals orally. There is no vaccine that I'm aware of. I got Hep C from a blood transfusion in the 80s and waited decades without symptoms for modern antivirals before finally getting treated.
- simoncion 2mo ago> I got Hep C from a blood transfusion in the 80s... Same here! I had one symptom -intermittent somewhat abnormal liver enzyme results- that was very easy to explain away with the fact that I'm nearly always somewhat dehydrated because I have trouble forcing myself to drink enough water. I had to run into a doc who was in the habit of running the test "just in case" because she had seen a ton of Hep C cases before the culprit was discovered. Honestly, I'm really glad I didn't get diagnosed much earlier than I did... it's my understanding that interferon treatment is really awful to go through and has like a 50% success rate for Hep C infections. When I got diagnosed Harvoni was quite new, but it worked on the strain I had, and there were absolutely no side effects that I noticed. Its list price was shockingly expensive (something like 150k USD) but that's way cheaper than a new liver and -as is often the case with these sorts of things- financial "wizardry" meant that I paid like 5 USD.
- s0rce 2mo agoI was young (got the transfusion just after I was born) but I understand that my parents got notified of the possible/likely infection based on that batch of blood leading to other infected patients, then I got tested and was positive. There was a class action lawsuit that paid for the otherwise very expensive treatment (I was treated 10 years ago). My doctor given my lack of symptoms for many years discouraged the interferon treatment anticipating that better drugs would be coming. He was right and I was treated without side effects before I ever had symptoms.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- thex10 2mo agoI am glad they’re screening for it. I was born to someone who had the virus, but didn’t know I had Hep C myself until I submitted myself to an exceptionally thorough STI testing panel. I say exceptional, because the standard ones I’d done throughout college and early adulthood do not happen to include that particular test. So I feel a bit lucky to have been able to get diagnosed and treated in my mid-20s, before the disease could do much damage.
- nly 2mo agoThat's odd. I just looked at what I thought was a pretty standard piss and blood STI test results of my own, and it covered: - Syphilis - Hep B - Hep C - HIV 1 and 2 and P24 - Chlamydia - Gonorrhoea
- thex10 2mo agoI forgot to mention my experience was in the northeastern USA in the 2000s-2010s. I’m happy you got a better standard of care than I did!
- nly 2mo agoAh OK, this was in London
- Aurornis 2mo agoHep C screening at least once for adults >= 18 is recommended and considered standard of care in the United States. I checked my medical records and I have a negative Hep C result in an old checkup when I was younger, and another one from a new provider who insisted on a big panel of standard testing for new patients (despite me having no risk factors). It’s unfortunate that your early providers dropped the ball. I wonder if they assumed you had already been tested for some reason?
- nly 2mo agoCrazy how different healthcare is in different countries. In the UK once you've had your childhood vaccinations it's entirely possible you'd simply never see a doctor again in your life until you're ready for your prostate exam in older life. There are no regular checkups or preventative care on the NHS for mid life adults unless you're proactive
- nipunaeka89 2mo ago[dead]
- claudex 2mo ago[flagged]
- b800h 2mo agoWe eliminated TB too. Then it came back.
- jiaosdjf 2mo ago[flagged]
- geophile 2mo ago[flagged]
- MoltenMan 2mo agoI'm not a trump fan, but the antivax train has nothing to do with him. (Evidence: Canada is doing even worse then us when it comes to measles). If we want to fix this problem (we do), the first step is to recognize the actual problem, not to play the blame game on whichever politician you currently don't like!
- nemomarx 2mo agoYou don't think RFK has anything to do with it?
- MoltenMan 2mo agoThe reason there are measles cases is because a decent percentage of people aren't getting vaccinated anymore. If all of the cases were 2 year olds or younger (when RFK was put in charge) then possibly. But not only are they older (https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html), this is also happening in Canada. I don't see how it could possibly be RFK's fault.
- AnotherGoodName 2mo agoWhile It’s fair to point out that RFK is hopping on a train that’s already got momentum, your first comment reads as if it’s not caused by falling vaccination rates (your second comment clarified further). Also why not blame politicians doing the wrong thing?
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- MoltenMan 2mo agoPerhaps I should've been clearer. And yes they aren't helping. And yes, we should blame them for the things they do. T But the comment I was responding to was acting as if MAGA was the reason for measles outbreaks, which is false. I'm an incredibly strong believer in the truth. An example of why I think this is an important separation: imagine you tried to fix the measles outbreak and miraculously got every single American to hate Trump and got Trump out of office. The problem would still not be fixed! People would still be dying of measles! The effort would have been almost completely wasted!
- ghastmaster 2mo agoSecond paraggraph: > The target of treating 80% of all known cases has already been met, and deaths from the virus have fallen by 36% in the last decade, just short of what is needed by 2030. What is needed by 2030? There is no mention prior to this statement. Later: > NHS England says that since 2015, more than 100,000 people have been diagnosed and treated for hepatitis C, meaning the country is already meeting that target. Again, what target are we talking about?? Much later: > Prof Frankie Swords, NHS national medical director, added: "England is now leading the world in the mission to eliminate this disease and on course to beat the WHO's 2030 target, but we are determined to keep up the momentum and finish the job. Finally a target! FUCK AI
- veltas 2mo agoThis isn't written by AI, this is just how BBC news articles are written. I find it frustrating too.
- ghastmaster 2mo agoI think you are partially correct. They trained AI on their articles to produce the same style articles. I am not a large consumer of BBC articles. This style of snippet after snippet is annoying. Perhaps that is why I am not a large consumer of BBC articles. > Style Assist helps BBC journalists quickly adapt trusted content into BBC News house style, speeding up the publication of high-quality local stories. It uses a BBC-trained AI model to generate a draft, which is always reviewed and edited by journalists before publication. This helps save time while maintaining accuracy, tone and editorial standards. Find out more in an article from Rhodri Talfan Davies. https://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/reports/policies/what-were-doing-with-ai/ https://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/reports/policies/what-were...
- M2Ys4U 2mo agoStyle Assist is mainly for articles written by journalists that are employed by third-party news organisations (who own the UK's local news outlets) but are subsidised by the BBC - these people are "local democracy reporters". LDRS articles are made free to everyone in the scheme (including the BBC), but because the content is written primarily for their home news org the articles that end up being published by the BBC need to be modified to comply with the BBC's editorial guidelines and for style reasons. Hence, Style Assist.
- lebuffon 2mo agoMakes me wonder if this project is the reason for a slight downturn in Liver cancer from 2019 forward in the UK. https://crukcancerintelligence.shinyapps.io/CancerStatsDataHub/_w_a3a611fa8d3349debdb42a4cf464b205/?_inputs_&nav=%22Incidence%20Breakdowns%20and%20Trends%22&app_select_CancerSite=%22Liver%22&app_select_Country=%22United%20Kingdom%22 https://crukcancerintelligence.shinyapps.io/CancerStatsDataH...
- AdmiralAsshat 2mo agoIntroducing: Hepatitis C++
- userbinator 2mo ago...followed by Hepatitis Rust
- pyuser583 2mo agoFor a second, I thought Hepatitis C was some 1980s C dialect that had memory safety issues.
- buildsjets 2mo agoYou're thinking of Objective Chlamydia, I believe.
- jagged-chisel 2mo agoSuch determination seems pretty subjective to me
- fuckyah 2mo ago[dead]
- pyuser583 2mo ago[flagged]
- GuB-42 2mo agoI guess someone complained about memory safety and they intend to rewrite hepatitis in Rust. Not everything has to be rewritten in Rust! Hepatitis is a virus, C is much better suited for that kind of project, Rust is for fungal diseases, not viruses.
- selimthegrim 2mo agoWouldn't measles be the better (immune) memory safety joke?
- jagged-chisel 2mo agoYou don’t have to ask theoretical questions. Write one yourself and post it in the comments, see how it goes! I’m rooting for you!
- farfatched 2mo agoSafe needle practices have been known for decades, it's really not that hard. If I say I'm going to borrow a needle and just look at it, you should just trust me. If I use it, I make sure to sterilize it before returning it.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- chancer131 2mo ago[flagged]
- biophysboy 2mo agoThere are two kinds of vaccine skeptics: a much larger group of people who will in fact have conversations about costs and benefits, and a small group of cranks like yourself that should be treated like the drooling imbeciles that they are. - Don't live in California - Risks are considered, but you will never be satisfied - Long-term risks have been studied with very good methodology.
- wredcoll 2mo agoNot that anyone who needs this will read it, but "skeptic" does not mean "already made up your mind and will never change it". People were "skeptical" of vaccines. Then they did science. Now they aren't. Then, yes, people like the guy trying starting this thread who will never be convinced and cannot change his mind.
- biophysboy 2mo agoThere's still value in communicating with cranks. You just have to take a different tack. Just say they're a crank. Then they hyperventilate about irrelevant details (like California) and other readers of the thread see what the whining is really about.
- hn5595p698 2mo ago[dead]
- mallory854 2mo agoThis is great news. Healthcare is such an asset in our pockets.
- msarrel 2mo agoWhat a funny headline. It has virtually nothing to do with the actual content of the article.
- dabinat 2mo ago> Around 50,200 adults are living with hepatitis C, figures for England in 2024 suggest. > Estimates indicate 84.6% of those living with hepatitis C have been diagnosed - just short of the 90% target. How do they know there are that many Hep C patients if they haven’t been diagnosed?
- becquerel 2mo agoPerhaps raw statistics, or estimates based on measuring traces in wastewater. I know that in the U.S. during covid they traced some new viral strains using that method.
- aljgz 2mo agoJust a guess: Ratio of positive results out of previously unknown cases gives a good estimate of the total expected unknown cases. Precision depends on selection bias, and statistics has tools to estimate and/or improve it.
- fkozlowski 2mo agoI've always found it a bit surprising that we don't all celebrate smallpox elimination day. I think it'd be a great reminder of the victories that humanity has had against the four horsemen.
- collinmcnulty 2mo agoI got really sad reading Good Omens where Pestilence has retired because of all the progress of medical science and thinking "if only". Funny enough, Pratchett has Famine doing exactly what's working for Pestilence today, convincing people to make bad choices despite easy ways to avoid the horsemen's influence.
- fkozlowski 2mo agoI wish Pestilence retired already!
- caycep 2mo agothe other side of this is the science behind the NS5B protein and the meds behind the new hep c cures. This is pretty fascinating stuff. In medicine, it's not often we see a cure like this.
- chancer131 2mo ago[dead]
- raver1975 2mo agoIn America people still die of tetanus, because vaccines are the devil's love juice.
- MarceliusK 2mo agoThere is a pretty striking contrast here with the infected blood scandal. The NHS went from being responsible for one of the worst hepatitis C transmission disasters in the country's history to potentially becoming one of the first health systems to eliminate the disease
- floki165 2mo ago[flagged]
- 1001111 2mo ago[dead]
- rob_c 2mo agoGiven the recent outbreaks of diseases we should have already eliminated here (for other reasons that "we shouldn't discuss")... I view this as a wonderful "they don't report in and the coroner doesn't check" type of elimination
- Carlawoodman47 2mo ago[dead]