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A New Zealand doctor has been running innovative drug trials that have given selected patients like Sarah the chance of a new life. But for the rest of the estimated 50,000 New Zealanders living with Hep C, there’s still a long wait ahead for these drugs to be approved and then publicly funded.
For Sarah, it was like “walking around in a marshmallow”, a permanent hangover even though she had given up drinking 15 years earlier. She lived with it even before the disease was identified by science. After 40 years suffering from Hepatitis C, a blood-borne disease that attacks the liver, earlier this month she was finally accepted on to a clinical trial for a new wonder-drug that promises to cure her. “I burst into tears when they told me,” she says. “I felt so happy, so lucky. It was like I had won Lotto.”
This morning, Sarah hopes she will awake in an Auckland hospital bed to be told she finally has the all clear. All it took was eating two slices of toast and taking three small white pills at 11.30am each morning for a few weeks .
These new drugs – painless, fast-acting, 95 per cent successful and, it seems, free of side-effects – are, say Ed Gane, Auckland University professor of medicine, “a dramatic change, a paradigm shift”.
He’s been trialling versions of them for major drug companies for the past five years, and those trials have given selected patients like Sarah the chance of a new life. But for the rest of the estimated 50,000 New Zealanders living with Hep C, there’s still a long wait ahead for these drugs to be approved and then publicly funded.
For those who can’t wait, there’s a man in Tasmania, factories in India and China, and a tiptoe across the lines of legality to try and rid yourself of a disease that many carriers simply don’t know they have – until their health has taken a very definite turn for the worse.