ideasIdea

Cure hepatitis C in prisons and drug services, and enrol the cured in liver cancer surveillance

Hepatitis C is now curable in weeks. Testing and treating where it is concentrated, and keeping those with scarring in surveillance afterwards, would cut liver cancer.

Direct-acting antivirals cure over 95% but HCC risk persists in those with advanced fibrosis. Propose opt-out testing and immediate treatment in prisons and needle services, with automatic enrolment of F3/F4 patients into HCC surveillance, blood-based where possible.

Hypothesis

Opt-out test-and-treat with surveillance linkage reduces HCC incidence and late-stage HCC among people who inject drugs by at least 40% within a decade.

Rationale

Elimination programmes in Egypt, Georgia and Australia show feasibility; the surveillance step is usually missing.

What would test it

Run a regional programme with registry evaluation.

Maturity

being tested at scale

Who has to act

policy

Cost to try

Medium ($1M to $50M)

Years to first evidence

Bottlenecks it attacks

Prevention we already have is not deployed · Around four in ten cancers are preventable with tools we already own: vaccines, tobacco control, weight, alcohol, sun and infection control.
Fragmented care and guideline gaps · Patients fall between specialists, wait for referrals and often do not get the treatment guidelines say they should.

Connected

4top

Pages like this

not linked directly; found by shared links

Cure hepatitis C in prisons and drug services, and enrol the cured in liver cancer surveillance

Connected

Pages like this

cancers

fronts

bottlenecks