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 veggie
Registered: 07/25/04
Posts: 6,100
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 Alarm at soaring rate of Hepatitis C [AU]
#6553930 - 02/11/07 12:27 PM (1 year, 7 months ago) |
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Alarm at soaring rate of hepatitis
February 12, 2007 - smh.com.au
HEPATITIS C rates among young Sydney drug users are now among the highest in the world, according to figures that indicate that one in two such users contract the disease each year.
The city has outstripped London's alarming rates of infection, and the NSW research team has warned that the "extremely high" numbers need the urgent attention of policy-makers.
"We obviously had an idea it was a problem but we had no idea it was going to be this high," said Professor Lisa Maher, of the National Centre in HIV Epidemiology and Clinical Research.
The team studied more than 200 addicts who were either younger than 30 or who had been injecting for less than three years, in Sydney's south-west.
They found that for every 100 new users followed for a year, 46 had the infection by the end. Rates were highest among women, teenagers, people originally from South-East Asia, cocaine injecters and those who had been using drugs for less than a year.
Professor Maher said these statistics, published in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health, and unpublished figures collected from two other NSW sites, painted a grim picture of rates in the state. They exceed those for London, which recently recorded a rate of 42 per 100 new users.
"This is one of the highest, if not the highest, documented rate of hep C infection in injecting-drug users in the world," Professor Maher said.
She said it showed prevention strategies implemented in the late 1980s did not appear to be working for this group.
New users appeared to pick up the blood-borne disease almost immediately after they started injecting, making the opportunity to help protect them "very, very small", she said.
"It seems you almost need to reach these people before they start injecting because otherwise they'll get the disease."
The findings also have implications for candidate vaccines in development. "We'll need to be careful about who we immunise, but obviously when is very important too," she said.
Hepatitis C is a slow-acting virus that causes liver inflammation and disease, as well as a range of symptoms like mood swings, itchy skin and nausea that can be managed with long-term treatment.
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