Hepatitis C, underdiagnosed

“The biggest problem is that there are patients who do not know that they have hepatitis C,” admits Dr. Francisco Jorquera Plaza, head of the Digestive System Unit at the León (Caule) Hospital Complex and head of the Digestive System Unit at the San Francisco Hospital. The Juan de Dios Hospital in León is dedicating World Hepatitis Day this Sunday, July 28, to the inflammatory liver disease that is asymptomatic and kills 3,500 people worldwide every day, 13 of them in Spain.

In this context, the specialist, one of the nine experts who signed the “Decalogue to Eliminate Hepatitis C”, published in the prestigious journal “Nature”, assures that “Spain is one of the few countries that can achieve the World Health Organization (WHO) target by 2030” thanks to a “magic model”.

“In 2015, an agreement was reached between the Ministry of Health, medical workers and patient associations so that everyone who needed it could have access to innovative drugs that could cure the C virus permanently and with virtually no side effects,” he recalls during the conversation. about interferon-free antiviral drugs that have caused a real therapeutic revolution comparable to the discovery of penicillin.

Since then, more than 170,000 patients have been treated in Spain, avoiding cirrhosis with serious consequences. “The C virus was cloned in 1989, the year I became a specialist doctor, and now, approaching professional retirement, I can celebrate that we have cured all the patients, although many were left behind and others “They developed liver cancer or had to undergo a transplant.”

Of course, there are still undetected patients, compounded by the fact that many are concentrated in vulnerable groups or at risk of social isolation, and as this year’s motto goes, “Now is the time to act.”

“We meet periodically with all the organizations that potentially affected people trust and plan information sessions to reach out to them and put all the resources at their disposal,” he explains. And, in his own words, “at the moment we can eliminate hepatitis C, but only in those where we know it exists.”

“Hepatitis C is only transmitted from an infected person to a healthy person. So every time we cure a patient, we prevent others from being infected in various ways, such as sexually, so we help break the chain of transmission,” he recalls after focusing on screening the population at greatest risk to expose them to the virus with an expiration date.