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An Abbotsford man wants the provincial government to fund more people to receive the medication that cured him of chronic hepatitis C, a viral liver disease.
Chris Robinson, 56, said it looked like he was on his way to receiving a long-awaited liver transplant to save his life last year when doctors told him, “Transplant? Remove it from your vocabulary.”
At the time, Robinson had been in the midst of a six-month course of a relatively new treatment that many in the medical field have termed “groundbreaking.”
Robinson’s treatment combined two drugs – Sovaldi and Ibavyr – that in clinical trials saw cure rates of up to 95 per cent in hepatitis C patients.
This meant that the hep C virus was not detected in patients’ blood when measured three months after treatment.
The new drugs were approved by Health Canada for use in November 2013 and made available to patients last year.
The problem is that the treatment is expensive – about $55,000 for a 12-week course of Sovaldi – and not everyone in need can afford it or will be approved for coverage by provincial PharmaCare.
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