National strategy needed to eliminate hepatitis C, expert says (but it would be very expensive)

[LuckyTheDog]

The U.S. is in the midst of a hepatitis C epidemic with as many as 3.9 million Americans infected with the liver-damaging virus. Aggressively targeting a concentrated population with the contagious but curable disease could be the best approach to eradicating the deadly virus.

The most logical place to launch the counterattack is in the country's jails and prisons, where the infection rate is about 17 percent, compared with 1 percent to 2 percent overall in the U.S., said Josiah Rich, a Brown University infectious disease physician. A recent study estimated that 1.86 million people with the virus were incarcerated.

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But there's a big hitch: the price tag. At $1,000 a pill for the new medicine, a single course of treatment for an individual costs as much as $84,000. Because of the high cost of the new drugs, all payers, public and private, are grappling with questions about which patients should get the new medications and how to pay for them.

The new drugs, simeprevir (marketed as Olysio by Janssen Therapeutics, a division of Johnson & Johnson) and sofosbuvir (sold as Sovaldi by Gilead Sciences) offer other advantages aside from their cure rates. They can be taken orally rather than through injection. The course of treatment is much shorter than previous drugs — 12 to 24 weeks compared with 48. And they produce none of the serious side effects caused by the previous medications, including nausea, fever, headaches and insomnia.

MORE HERE: http://wonkynewsnerd.com/national-strategy-needed-eliminate-hepatitis-c/

[Comrade Grumpy]

1. Solution: A nation pharmaceutical enterprise, not driven by profit.

[Warren Stupidity]

2. "A recent study estimated that 1.86 million people "

So in a rational society, our government would bargain with the manufacturer for the 1.86 million treatments needed for the incarcerated victims of this disease, which is about half of the total US market, and get the price down to reasonable levels. The manufacturer should get a reasonable profit, just not the profit they think they should be getting.