There are very few side-effects to the DAAs and the mild ones that some people get are short-lived. Success rates, as Dr F points out elsewhere on this forum, are around 95% in both clinical trials and real world treatment. This is most unusual in science – clinical trials nearly always have higher success rates than real world treatments for a range of reasons. This says to me that DAAs work. Period.

Why have you had to stop your job? Isn’t there employment law that protects you against this discrimination. I’ve heard of surgeons with HCV continuing to work. As long as your employers know, your occupational health team know and you take precautions (i.e. wearing surgical gloves) the chances of you getting cut and blood making contact with the patient’s blood are tiny. And, beyond that, surely there are other non-patient contact roles you could fill in the meantime.

The video with Bill Gates makes me want to puke. If he wasn’t a billionaire and he or a family member of his had HCV he absolutely wouldn’t be trotting out that line.

And the thing about the US pricing system being better than most is just pants. I think I’m right in saying that the US charge the highest price in the world for Harvoni. It’s almost twice the price it is in the UK or Germany. Gilled might argue that the US is the richest country in the world but when one divides GDP by the population the US is only slightly richer (per person) than these countries.

Would you mind sharing why you are having your treatment extended?

It says in your signature that you were UND at week 12 and if you have just finished 6 months of treatment then it seems that you will have been UND for at least 12 weeks by now…so why the need to extend?

Forgive me if I’ve got the maths wrong. The reason I ask is that I have 8 weeks of sof/dac left and I am considering not taking them as I have been UND for 4 weeks now. The background being that I initially got 8 weeks of Harvoni via the NHS but my VL was still 269 at week 4 and it looked like I was responding slowly so I made arrangements to extend the treatment with generics. But by week 8 I was UND (not just below the cut-off but no RNA detected); but by that point my contingency plan (i.e. treatment extended with 12 weeks of sof/dac) had already started. I didn’t want to wait until and see what my VL was at the end of the Harvoni treatment because if I was still detectable at that point there would have been a gap between the two treatments and the gains made from the 1st round would have been lost.

I’m going to book another appointment with Dr F before I decide. All the evidence says that 12 weeks of treatment* is what people like me should have, and I have almost had that now between the two treatments. Whilst I really don’t think there will be longterm issues with the DAAs they are new drugs so I worry a little about taking them longer than may be needed. But on the other hand, extending treatment to 24 weeks (or, more accurately, 20 weeks in my case) adds a few extra percentage points to my chances of SVR, and if I did continue it wouldn’t be a problem as my side effects are minimal.

Patrick

*In fact, this is what I should have got from the NHS but somewhere between financial reasons and my last biopsy showing F0 eight weeks was all I got offered. But I had a fibroscan done during the treatment which came back at 9.1 (F2) so it seems there must have been progression in the 2 years since I had the biopsy; either that or the biopsy sampled a non-fibrosed part of my liver.

“Lollies” are “candies” in Oz slang! Well, you learn something new every day. A lolly in the UK is a certain type of ice cream, and a candy is called a “sweet”. Cultural differences, eh!

Great video. Loved the first half of it.

But that silly jargon-speak woman at the end. She’s totally lying: if she had HCV and wasn’t being offered treatment, of course, she would go the generic route.

It’s fine for her to say that the National Institute of Clinical excellence has approved these drugs in the UK. It did that on the 1st of March, but the problem we have is that NHS England – who have the ultimate control of the purse strings – have placed a monthly cap on what each hospital can spend on DAAs, which effectively means that the NHS has to ration these drugs and give them to the most needy (i.e. people with cirrhosis) first, and everyone else has to wait until each hospital has worked its way through those patients before they can be treated….

…and in that time – which could take a couple of years in the busier hospitals – everyone else with HCV is getting sicker; to the extent that a significant proportion of these people will be unable to work and thus place a greater cost burden on the taxpayer through a llfe time of benefits than the cost of treatment of treating them now would do.

Short term thinking. Don’t wait, is what I say.

Great stuff. And just to think that none of this would be possible without the internet. Doesn’t bear thinking about.

I can’t answer that question unfortunately as I’m on a Mac and don’t use anti-viral software. I suspect it doesn’t make a difference though.