Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government, further to the Written Answer by Lord O’Shaughnessy on 22 March (HL5975), what steps they are taking to ensure that more precise figures on the number of people with undiagnosed Hepatitis C are made available.

Most recent estimates suggest that around 160,000 people in England are living with chronic hepatitis C (HCV) infection. Published figures of the number who remain undiagnosed are not available although surveillance data and modelling are used to generate estimates for healthcare planning assumptions.

An estimate of the proportion of people who inject drugs who are diagnosed can be obtained from the Public Health England survey entitled Data tables of the Unlinked Anonymous Monitoring Survey of HIV and Hepatitis in People Who Inject Drugs. A copy of this survey is attached.

In this survey, only around one half of people injecting psychoactive drugs sampled are aware of their HCV antibody positive status (53% in 2015), and this figure has remained relatively stable at this level (averaging 52%) over the past decade.