Up to four people die every week from hepatitis C in Spain

Although it does decade since the advent of antiviral drugs (ADD) that treat hepatitis C disease, still are produced four deaths per week in Spain This is due to causes related to hepatitis C, which, as the coordinator of the Alliance to Eliminate Viral Hepatitis in Spain (AEHVE) and Dr. Javier García-Samaniego warn, “can be avoided.”

“Eat treatment that cures practically at 100% cases and what if early introductioncan prevent the damage it causes to the liver over the years,” also says the head of the hepatology department at the University Hospital of La Paz (HULP) in Madrid.

Near 170,000 patients treated and cured since 2015, Spain leads the fight against hepatitis C worldwide, despite this, it is necessary to continue to make progress in eliminating this chronic viral infection that causes there is no vaccinebut it is the treatment that cures it.

The key to thisdeath is associated with late diagnosiswhat’s happening in a third of cases and this is what makes the damage already existing in the liver irreversible in many cases, despite the infection being cleared.

Given the prevalence of active infection in the general population, which the Ministry of Health estimated at 0.22% in 2018 and which AEHVE estimates will be around 0.1% today, cases that have yet to be diagnosed, treated and cured overall population, that is, people who contracted this infection two decades ago and do not know that they have it or were not treated at that time.

“Every person with a late diagnosis (symptoms of hepatitis C are nonspecific and the disease can take up to 20 years to appear) will generate high burden of disease -cirrhosis and liver cancer, among others, – for the health system”, explains Dr. Marta Casado, President of the Spanish Foundation of the Digestive System (FEAD), for which the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) and diagnostic strategies such as sample grouping or pooling would make age-based screening among the general population quite acceptable.

It is estimated that there are still 20,000 people with hepatitis C who don’t know who has an infection. Finding these undiagnosed or lost patients in the general population is one challenge, to which is added the active search for cases among the most vulnerable groups, people who are far from the usual patterns of care and who can only be reached through decentralized resources and alternative strategies.

“We, as specialists, have been on this path for ten years,” with the support of NGOs and local organizations closest to these populations, using microelimination strategies that bring diagnosis and treatment closer to these people, the expert noted.