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Editor’s note: This is part one of a two-part series focusing on hepatitis C in Tennessee prisons. Part two focuses on the public health impacts of treating prisoners infected with the disease, and a prison policy that leaves some victims in the dark.
John Bilby should be dead by now.
Before September, the 66-year-old inmate didn’t know about the hepatitis C that’s slowly destroying his liver. Then, after 27 years in prison, they told him he had six months to live.
“He says I have (terminal cirrhosis of the liver) and without a liver transplant I will die,” Bilby said in a letter to The Tennessean, referencing a recent conversation with a prison doctor.
Bilby’s asked for treatment, but he’s one of thousands who’ve been denied.