Robert James attended the sixth International Hepatitis C Conference in Lisbon in February. The biggest lesson, for him, was how much less attention is devoted to this often fatal disease, which infects 10 times more people in Britain than HIV
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Well, the sun shone in February and we wandered the hotel terrace in
T-shirts. This was the Lisbon conference organised by the UK National
Hepatitis C Resource Centre (a project of Mainliners) in conjunction with
a sexual health agency in Portugal, Abraco.
It knitted together the different strands much better than previous ones,
with themed talks and workshops in prevention, treatment, patient involvement
and social care and discrimination. Professor Fernando Ventura, the chair
of the Portugal Aids Commission, began by telling us: "Our goal is
to achieve happiness, ours and others."
HCV ignored - but ten times more prevalent in the UK than HIV
But...the first day again highlighted just how little progress has been
made in the UK and how easy it is to ignore this disease. There are about
10 times as many people with HCV than HIV in the UK, and in countries
like Portugal where HIV is spread
more often through needles, HIV/HCV co-infection is the rule rather than the exception. Yet there were only 200 people at this conference - an HIV
