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The provincial government is spending $5 million to study ways to reduce the spread of hepatitis C among intravenous drug users located mainly on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
Health Minister Terry Lake made the announcement Thursday in Vancouver with the director of the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, Dr. Julio Montaner, who will lead the research.
Montaner championed the ‘treatment as prevention’ approach to HIV/AIDS in which everyone diagnosed with that virus is treated, thereby reducing the chances they will pass the blood-borne infection to another person. It’s credited with an 88-per-cent drop in new AIDS cases in B.C. since 1994 and has since been endorsed by the World Health Organization.
“Treatment as prevention focuses on pro-actively engaging people in supportive care to prevent them from passing on the virus,” said Lake at a news conference. “This new research will look at whether we can replicate the success with hepatitis C.”
It will focus on people who have already taken an effective new line of medication that clears them of the hepatitis C virus, but who could be reinfected if they share needles or crack pipes that transfer blood from one person to another.
Almost all new cases of hepatitis C in Canada are among drug users, but tens of thousands of baby boomers in B.C. have also been infected — most without knowing it — by unsafe medical and dental practises in the ’50s and ‘60s. About 30,000 Canadians also picked up the virus via tainted blood products prior to 1990.