TOPIC:

Nice, Mike..
EMMY! CONGRATZ ONCE AGAIN!!!!!!!!!! JUMPING UP AND DOWN HERE IN BELGIUM LOLOLOLOL

mgalbrai wrote: The Past is History,
The Future is a Mystery,
Today is a Gift- that's why they call it "The Present"
-Some dead person said that.

Happy for you, Em
I said that.
Mike

Hey AD, okay I'll check that out and see if I can add a thumb, not promising anything tho lol. Thanks mate.

Love the verse Mike, no mincing words with that poet. Em

You can be in my world, if I can be in yours.
-Bob Dylan said that...
M

Congratulations, Emilio. Hope the positive results continue!

SO HAPPY for you Em, you are an inspiration and truly a decent caring person. I know you will help so many more heppers as you have helped me move forward to reach for healing. Thank you a million times, and thanks to Dr. James and crew. The facebook page sounds like a great idea and hope you can reach out to many more.

about time Em, I was looking out for the good news from you, well done !.

you said:
"a journalist the other day around often being asked 'how did you get the disease?' Well we know that most get it from IV drug use and smaller percentages from elsewhere, ie. childbirth, transfusions, etc. But the question is sometimes loaded and attempts to divide us into separate categories - you deserve this! and you don't. So I'm representing all of the former IV drug users and junkies who 'do not deserve this disease'. Hence emilio (the junkie heper) Johnson. Happy to represent the so called lowest denomination. Fuck them! Em"

The more interesting question is how did the virus get into the "junkie" blood in the first place?? why stop there?
The HCV virus was in the blood's general populations long before people started to inject drugs.

The natural history of the virus tells us this virus probably came from the African jungles in the last century, jumping from animals to humans & then brought over on slave ships to the West. Some articles even mention the Egyptian Mummies.
Then the 1 & 2 World War soldiers getting wounded, getting exposed to a lot of blood via open wounds, transfusions & then passing it on to others via blood donations & so on, as the virus was not discovered until long after the wars finished.
The whole thing is rather much more complex then the cliche: it's "junky disease".

A big dose of congratulations Em. Fantastic news!! There's hardly words that can convey what this all means.

Coral

Thanks Coral and Jolie

Thanks for your response Jolie. Yes the virus has an interesting history and certainly wasn't created by this set of silly young invincibles experimenting with drugs. In Australia we had significant Italian migration after the WWII and most were Calebrese. Many of the migrants were infected with HCV at the point of jumping on the boat via dodgy vaccination methods, essentially jabbing everyone with the same needle.

Now they definitely did not deserve this disease! Em

I'm really happy to hear you are undetectable.
Congrats!

In a world very short on happy endings this page gives me so much hope and joy. It's also very frustrating now to have to wait now for this fibroscan so I can be cured too. 25 years worth of waiting and struggling is hanging very heavily on me. Before I found out about the cure I was suppressing it, now I cannot!

After all these years I also shouldn't be shocked by the brutality of peoples judgmental and dehumanising attitudes towards drug users, but somehow I still am. At the core of it is the herd pressure to conformity. If you flaunted the rules you deserve to die. What kind of sick mentality is that? On the positive side the Hep has kept these kind of people out of my life, so thats something to be thankful for.

Thanks FF, I think as a society we need to be talking about this a bit more and HCV sufferers haven't wanted to discuss this very subject in open forum. Shit I outed myself today after 30 years, well there is your inner circle but announcing your situation to the world is something completely different. When we look to the champions of this disease, most do not have/ or have had the disease. Where are the champions? Tommy Lee, Steven Tyler and Pamela Anderson. Speaks volumes to the standing or perceived standing of HCV sufferers in this world. So I wish to personally thank you James Freeman and Greg Jeffrey (here's another HCV sufferer and champion, I missed) Em

Hi Emilio,

I can understand many of us with HCV feel stigmatised. Me, I injected drugs once (about 36 years ago) but like the famous Bill Clinton, I swear didn't inhale. Does that make me a junkie? Is that how I got the virus? Or did it come from my sadistic dentist who liked drilling big holes in little childrens' teeth? ... Shoot, I should do a Google search on this...

Anyway, you're right. The more it is talked about the better! I have told everyone I know - family, friends, work-colleagues - that I have HCV, and the universal response has been really amazing - "yeah, I have heard about that - its a horrible disease, etc". Absolutely the least important question was "how did you get it"?

Even better, everyone was really interested to learn that there's an amazing group of people in Australia who against all the odds are actually doing something about it... Bloody brilliant! We Brits are proud of you!

I can't propose any famous champions of the disease. There is a good list here:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_with_hepatitis_C

but many of them are dead because it.

Vororo.

Wow lots of great talent on that list! Western culture would clearly be as dead as a dodo if it wasn't for "junkies".

There's a lot of ignorance about the nature of drug use and abuse. The vast majority of drug users in my time were not junkies at all but recreational/occasional users. Not that I am suggesting a hierarchy of deserving. Everyone deserves to be healthy, no exceptions.
But you certainly didn't need to be an addict to contract the disease back then. It was a very widespread social phenomenon that cut right across the social spectrum. Young people being young people will always want to experiment. That will never change. Only solution is to make it safe for them to do so. Its a resentment of youth and freedom of expression, this "war on drugs".

Right hepatitis C was only discovered in 1989, and there was no way for the "youth" of our generation even to know about it. If I had known, I would have inhaled instead

More seriously, while we in the west associate HVC with drug use and blood transfusions, there seems to be good evidence the the virus has been around from between 500 and 2000 years:

evolve.zoo.ox.ac.uk/Evolve/Oliver_Pybus_files/InvestigatingEndemicHCV.pdf

... which long before hypodermic needles were invented.

Even though most doctors would probably laugh at the idea that HVC can be transmitted by insect bites, how else could it have spread around the world if it really has existed for so long? I would guess that most of the estimated 150 000 000 people with the virus today have never been near a hypodermic needle?

We know that HVC is a flavivirus (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flaviviridae), many of which are transmitted by athropods. So why not HVC also?

OK, there is good evidence that HVC does not replicate in the stomach of a mosquito like in malaria (which is actually caused by the plasmodium parasite).

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC88344/

But if HVC has only existed in man for a few hundred years, it is natural to suppose that the transmission mechanism would not be very efficient... According to a recent review (2013), HVC could have jumped species from (wait for it) ... man's best friend, the dog!?

www.roslin.ed.ac.uk/assets/profile-pages...he-origin-of-hcv.pdf

I confess that I knew very little about Hep C, and how one would catch it, when I was diagnosed (after an iffy LFT and then routine bloods taken by my Doctor). I had no conception of its implications etc. Anyway after much reading (and scaring myself half to death) I took the bull by the horns so to speak and arranged to have a Fibro scan and Ultrasound done. Thankfully those results came back good and apparently I have only a fatty liver at the moment (this was back in February/March). A work colleague bought in an article from The Age on the Buyers Club and the rest is history. I am in my third week of treatment and will have the all important blood test next week.

I have absolutely no idea how I contracted the virus and I guess it doesn't really matter now but in the early days I really wanted to know so I would have someone to blame for it......I doubt I will ever find out now but I sure do want to make people aware that Dr Freeman and his team and also Em (who has been a great support to me) are there to help. I did follow Greg Jeffrey's blog for a while as well.

I don't judge anyone and at the end of the day it really doesn't matter how people catch it, it is now about curing it!!

Cheers Lynne

Wow! That is fantastic news, so very happy for you