FIND India to Host Media Roundtable on Hepatitis C Issues In India

FIND India will host a media roundtable as part of the Unitaid-funded HEAD-Start project, on Tuesday, 29 Jan 2019 at Dy. Speaker Hall, Ground Floor, Constitution Club of India, Rafi Marg, New Delhi between 11:00 am – 2:00 pm.

 FIND, a global non-profit dedicated to accelerating the development, evaluation and delivery of high-quality, affordable diagnostic tests for poverty-related diseases, now including malaria, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, sleeping sickness, hepatitis C, leishmaniasis, Chagas disease, Buruli ulcer, non-malarial fever and diseases with outbreak potential, such as Ebola.

It is estimated that between 60 lakh to 1.1 crore persons are infected with Hep C annually. In India, population prevalence of HCV is around 1 percent, which amounts to an estimated 12 million people likely to be infected with HCV.

 In 2015, an estimated 59,000 patients died and India stands fourth among 11 countries which carry almost 50 per cent of the global burden of chronic hepatitis. Hepatitis C is a hidden epidemic. The burden of this liver disease falls most heavily on low- and middle-income countries, where 75% of infections and deaths occur but few people living with HCV have actually been diagnosed.

Better tests to more easily diagnose and monitor HCV are urgently needed to guide individual patient care, and to screen and test communities at risk. Existing tests are too complex and expensive for countries with limited budgets, weak health systems or both. With new treatments that can cure people of HCV in just three months (compared to the older regimens that took up to a year and required injections), we have a unique opportunity to eliminate HCV as a public health problem if the right tests and treatments are available and affordable to everyone.

 Looking at the current HCV scenario, FIND India is organizing a sensitization workshop to facilitate a discussion around HCV issues in India.