New treatment set for hepatitis C

A new drug to treat people newly diagnosed with hepatitis C has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and is available at Strong Memorial Hospital.

The treatment, Rebetron, is a combination of two antiviral drugs that is currently being used to treat patients who suffer a relapse of the disease. Such a relapse can result in cirrhosis of the liver and even liver cancer.

FDA approval makes the medicine available to people who have just been diagnosed with the disease and are beginning treatment. Up to now, the combination was available to new patients only through research studies, including one at the University.

In recent studies, physicians have shown that the new treatment is much more likely than today's standard treatment to kill off enough of the virus so that the level of virus in a person's blood becomes undetectable and relatively harmless. However, the virus remains in the body and can intensify at any time.

Hepatitis C is a serious and sometimes deadly chronic liver ailment that infects nearly 4 million mostly unsuspecting Americans. Only about 5 percent of those people know they are infected. It is much more dangerous than Type A, which can be spread by food handlers, and Type B, which is spread through contact with the blood of an infected person. Those patients typically recover within a few weeks.