Hepatitis
(asked on 12th October 2017) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps his Department is taking to eliminate Hepatitis C.
The United Kingdom government is a signatory to the World Health Assembly resolution and World Health Organization (WHO) goal of eliminating hepatitis C as a major public health threat by 2030.
Progress towards achieving the WHO elimination goal is summarised in this year’s Public Health England’s (PHE) report “Hepatitis C in the UK”:
This showed that better access to improved treatment has led to the first fall in deaths from severe hepatitis C related liver disease in a decade and that the UK is on target for the WHO interim goal to reduce hepatitis C mortality by 10% by 2020.
For England a sustainable rollout of access to new direct acting antivirals for treating chronic hepatitis C is underway with investment of in excess of £200 million per year. The current financial year (2017/18) is the third year of hepatitis C treatment ramp-up and the plan is to treat 12,500 individuals.
An estimated 160,000 persons are believed to have hepatitis C in England. Further modelling work is being undertaken by PHE to update estimates of the impact of treatment roll out on prevalence of hepatitis C and hepatitis C-associated advanced liver disease. Previous PHE modelling of the scale up of treatment indicates that a “rapid complete coverage” scenario of treating 20,000 or more individuals per year and up to 50% of those infected each year would result in end-stage liver disease / hepatocellular cancer being halved within 10 years.