Haemophilia & Hepatitis C My hepatitis cure
G
avin Finkelstein is the president of Haemophilia Foundation Western Australia. He has lived with haemophilia for his whole life, and with hepatitis C since childhood. For World Hepatitis Day, he was kind enough to tell us his story of living with coinfection and how he was cured of hepatitis C.
Until at least 1995, people in Australia with haemophilia and related bleeding disorders were totally reliant on blood products for all of our treatment. In my case I was born in 1962 and when I was young I was
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treated with bottles of whole blood that were infused (each over a 12-hour period) to resolve bleeds. This would happen anywhere between 10 and 50 times a year. This means I was probably infected with the hepatitis C virus (HCV) before I was 5 years old, and then reinfected perhaps hundreds of times over the
but they were still blood products. For example, we went from whole blood to blood plasma-based products, which were in smaller volumes for treatment, and which didn’t require extended hospital stays. I would be injected with the blood plasma product (called cryoprecipitate) and then go
years. Although HCV has existed in humans for perhaps thousands of years, it was not properly identified until 1989, so there was no way to identify it in the blood of a donor.
home. I no longer had to be an “in-patient”, waiting for the bottles of blood to empty into me over a 12-hour period.
Over the years our treatment products were refined,
HEPATITIS SA COMMUNITY NEWS 91 • October 2021
Another later innovation was plasma-derived clotting factor concentrate: each
