Couple of News Stories

[BeatHepC]

<a href="http://www2.gastrojournal.org/scripts/om.dll/serve?action=searchDB&searchDBfor=art&artType=abs&id=as0016508503015166&nav=abs">Insulin resistance is associated with chronic hepatitis C and virus infection fibrosis progression</a>

(from the paper):

"<i>Conclusions: Hepatitis C virus may induce insulin resistance irrespective of the severity of liver disease, and this effect seems to be genotype specific. Further, our findings support the hypothesis that insulin resistance may contribute to fibrotic progression in chronic hepatitis C virus infection.</i>"

[litecloud]

I am a 10 minute car ride from those addreses, mmmm maybe I should go knock on their door.

[LvdByGod]

that is such a terrible conclusion that they came up with...not to mention flat out wrong... if several of us had a blood test done years ago, we wouldn't be facing this thing with cirhosis right now. we'd have the chance to clear with our livers intact. the general public is at risk so long as there are people who don't know they have it... bummer...

do you think it's money motivated somehow?

[willing]

yes, it's about $ and, harsh as it may seem to those of us with the illness,  that make sense: given a fixed amount of money to spend on public health you want to maximize your return. Their arguments against screening the population at large look pretty sound to me- but not screening IV drug users and other high risk  groups where the % of carriers might be as high as 70-90 is pretty hard to understand - let's let them know!

David Atkins, M.D., M.P.H.
Chief Medical Officer
Center for Outcomes and Evidence
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
540 Gaither Road, Suite 6000
Rockville, MD 20850
Phone: [phone]
Fax: [phone]
E-mail: ***@****

Barbara Gordon
Administrative Coordinator
Center for Outcomes and Evidence
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
540 Gaither Road, Suite 6000
Rockville, MD 20850
Phone: [phone]
Fax: [phone]
E-mail: ***@****

[willing]

the 'I' recommendation on routine screening of IV drug users looks like thoroughly irresponsible medical policy: it's not worth spending $60 to inform a past/current IV user that they have and can easily spread the disease?
If this bothers you, you might consider firing off some mail to the 15 members the USPS <a href="http://www.ahrq.gov/clinic/uspstbio.htm#Calonge">Task Force</a>.