Hi Tanya,

my experience was that I had some slight side effects in the first 3 weeks of treatment, but the rest of the treatment till week 12 went without any other side effects.

About the anxiety, I experienced 2 kinds:
– between EOT and SVR12 – I was worried about a relapse …. yet I kept telling myself I should simply wait and see what happens, being prepared to do another course of treatment if necessary.
– the second one happened after ~6 months from the EOT. I experienced the pain I was having several years before when I relapsed after the interferon treatment. Panic, loss of sleep, etc. I talked to dr. Freeman and he gave me couple of good advices which enabled me to understood better what was causing me the anxiety.

So, if your pain is related to anxiety and not to other cause, have patience, try to understand the nature of your anxiety and …. avoid resting too much . In my case it helped a lot to do various activities no matter how hard it seemed to be. Staying still was far worse than being active.

Cheers,
RHF

Perhaps a little bit off-topic, but I think it is the first time when we may see a clear message in the Easl journal that generics provide similar results as original compounds:

Licensed generic drugs and drugs agreed with the Medicines Patent Pool have been shown to generate similar results to the original compounds. The presence of the drug at the appropriate dosage must be verified by the provider and guaranteed
to the prescriber and patient. Indeed, effective and safe generics are a crucial resource in resource-limited countries.

Cheers
RHF

I do not think Gilead is not “bad” anymore…. I would say they just suffer a side-effect of their high price policy and the fact that the healthcare systems do not afford to treat all patients and thus limit the access to treatments. If you look at Gilead’s financial statements for 2017 you may see:
HCV product sales, which consist of Harvoni® (ledipasvir 90 mg/sofosbuvir 400 mg), Sovaldi® (sofosbuvir 400 mg), Epclusa® (sofosbuvir 400 mg/velpatasvir 100 mg) and Vosevi® (sofosbuvir 400 mg/velpatasvir 100 mg/voxilaprevir 100 mg), were $1.5 billion for the fourth quarter of 2017 compared to $3.2 billion for the same period in 2016 and $9.1 billion for the full year 2017 compared to $14.8 billion in 2016. The declines were across all major markets.

So a drop of sales, but it is not clear whether they treated the same number of patients as in 2016.

According to a recent news available in my country, the government contracted a number of 12 000 treatments for the year 2017 (where it is estimated that more than 600 000 people have HCV), but managed to treat only 7 000 people. The treatment is provided to F3, F4 patients and the F2 patients having certain complications. This means a huge number of patients are not eligible to receive the treatment. In addition to this only few people know they have HCV and from those who know that are sick and do not meet the criteria for getting the free treatment, the solution of generic HCV drugs via parallel importation looks as a good option. Why wait till you got sicker to meet some stupid “access to treatment criteria” when you can get treated cheaper now?

P.S. I think we are getting tired in telling over and over that governments should remove the stupid access to treatment criteria and have a closer look to generic HCV medication.

Cheers,
RHF

Hi JohnSmith,

You raise an interesting question, I hope I can summarize my experience in a helpful way for you:
– before treatment – I had many questions, some doubts whether generic drugs really works and whether it will harm me. Dr. Freeman and FixHepC forum members helped me in gaining trust I could get healthy again, so I decided to start the treatment.
– during treatment – in the first 3 weeks I had some minor headaches and a little bit of insomnia. Starting from week 4 no noticeable side effects.
– after treatment till SVR12 – I got anxious in knowing whether I was really cured…. Not taking the pills anymore made me feel at risk .
– after SVR12 – life is on a normal track, I have a normal life with all that this means (yet I am still cautious about what I eat and drink – everything with moderation).

I hope this helps,

Cheers,
RHF

A very sad news and a very big loss…
I feel honored that I had the opportunity to know him here on Fixhepc and to have asked him several times for his advices. He was always willing to help someone, very wise and a real moderator in the true sense of the word.

@Ariel: please let people know that Gaj’s wonderful work spread all over the world and that someone here in Romania will miss him ….

Cheers,
RHF

I’ve seen the video has subtitles that have been translated in quite many languages.

Unfortunately this is not that visible (one has to know how to activate the captions on youtube and then select the language for the subtitle).

Perhaps an idea would be to create playlists for each language (italian, french, romanian) so that the video would be shown directly with the captions. I am not sure how this could be done or if it can be done…..

Cheers,
RHF