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It is financially feasible to defuse the hepatitis C “viral time bomb” affecting 150 million people worldwide, an international conference will hear on Saturday.
The disease is one of the five major causes of infectious illness deaths in the world, along with malaria, TB, HIV, and hepatitis B. It kills 500,000 people a year, the World Health Organisation estimates, and prevents millions more from leading productive lives.
Yet, only one in 300 of those infected is receiving any treatment, despite the arrival of new wonder drugs that have a 95 per cent success rate of curing the disease in just 12 weeks with one pill a day.
The crisis will headline debate at the International Liver Conference, which opens in Barcelona on Saturday.
A presentation led by Dr James Freeman, a Tasmanian-based Telehealth pioneer who set up a Dallas Buyers Club-style operation to help hepatitis C sufferers source and test generic versions of the life-saving drugs for a fraction of the price demanded by drug companies, argues generics are the answer to treating the disease worldwide.
“We have the power to fix hep C [but] do we have the willpower? The willpower to think global but act local, and see the cure deployed on a mass scale? Or would we rather blindly protect patent rights at the expense of patient lives?” he said before the conference.
“Generics work, so let’s deploy them and wipe hepatitis C off the face of the planet.”