Hep C: ‘More aggressive than HIV’

People with both HIV and Hepatitis C (HCV) face much more danger of death than those with HIV alone, the autumn BHIVA conference heard.
Dr Mark Nelson, of the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, said that HIV/HCV co-infection was now such a serious problem that 50 per cent of deaths on Aids wards were now due to liver failure.
“In the past we told our patients: ‘Don’t worry because you’re going to die from HIV, not Hepatitis’ but now HCV is much more aggressive in the HIV population and the disease progression rate is very fast.”
The high rates of HIV/HCV co-infection are not just among intravenous drug users but also among gay men, where they are now as high as 14 per cent, and among infants of co-infected mothers the rate is as much as 17 per cent, Dr Nelson said.
Hepatitis C has now been shown to be transmitted sexually and Dr Nelson said that he has seen 24 new cases this year at his clinic, often at the same time as HIV and syphilis infections.
With the advent of new drugs, especially pegylated interferon and ribavirin, HCV is now “potentially a treatable disease.” However, the results of HCV treatments are often disappointing and only work in less than half of co-infected patients.
He suggested that all patients at HIV clinics should be regularly screened for HCV and all people need to be made aware that HCV can be transmitted sexually.
“It’s important to treat each patient as a person, not as a lump of meat,” Dr Nelson added.
Martin Flynn

Interfering with HIV

RNA interference, an ancient defence mechanism that plants and other organisms use to fight off

viruses, could potentially be used as a strategy for treating HIV, scientists report.
Dr Judy Lieberman, of the Centre for Blood Research in Boston, USA, said that RNA