Veteran 6 23 2016

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35 cents

VOL. 4/ISSUE 34

THURSDAY, JUNE 23, 2016

VA has hepatitis C treatments that work Patrick McCallister FOR VETERAN VOICE

pmccallister@veteranvoiceweekly.com

Hepatitis C can be cured. The Department of Veteran Affairs’ Veterans Health Administration is reaching out to diagnosed veterans to get in to get cured. “Over the last two years, maybe three, there have been some pretty amazing drugs that have come out on the market,” Nick Beckey, chief of pharmacy service at the West Palm Beach VA Medical Center said. The center sent letters to known affected veterans earlier this month. The letter says that since 2014 the center has treated more than 530 veterans with hepatitis C with a 90 to 95 percent cure rate. Fewer than 10 stopped treatments due to side effects. “All of these drugs are very tolerable,” Beckey said. That’s important, because previous treatments with lower success rates — 30 to 60 percent — were hard to take. Firstly, they were painful injections. Secondly, they caused severe flu-like symptoms. The injections seemed like a case of the treatment being worse than the disease. Hepatitis C is a blood-borne viral liver infection. In some cases, it’s short-lived. However, about 2.7 to 3.4 million Americans have chronic hepatitis C, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There’s a higher-than-average number of diagnosed veterans versus the general population. That could be due to greater exposure to risk factors in or after service, or because the VA aggressively screens for the virus. “The risk is the highest among the baby boomer generation,” Beckey said. “They were more likely to be exposed to it.” During the Vietnam War, many were exposed to hepatitis C through contaminated blood transfusions and battlefield blood exposure. Additionally, hepatitis C was a risk to anyone getting a blood transfusion before 1992. Often the virus is transmitted through needle sharing. As of 2015, about 175,000 veterans in the VA

U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs Vietnam Veteran Jack Flowers says a VA employee ‘saved his life’ in helping him find treatment for Hepatitis C. system had been diagnosed with the virus. There were an additional 50,000 undiagnosed cases suspected. People can have hepatitis C for years and even decades without apparent symptoms until they become acute. The latest treatment approved the by Food and Drug Ad-

ministration is Zepatier. That was approved in January. The new drug treatments are oral and usually span eight to 24 weeks, with eight to 12 being the most common. Beckey

See HEPATITIS page 6

Cyber Guard tackles multiple crises Karen Parrish

FOR YOURVOICE NEWS & VIEWS

info@YourVoiceWeekly.com

Between 1 million and 10 million U.S. homes and businesses are without power.

An oil spill from a near-shore refinery is gushing into the waters off Texas and Louisiana. The port of Los Angeles is shut down due to a network outage.

See CYBERGUARD page 4


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