Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Comment
. 2011 Jan 15;113(2-3):83-5; discussion 86-7.
doi: 10.1016/j.drugalcdep.2010.08.001. Epub 2010 Sep 15.

Can Hepatitis C virus treatment be used as a prevention strategy? Additional model projections for Australia and elsewhere

Affiliations
Comment

Can Hepatitis C virus treatment be used as a prevention strategy? Additional model projections for Australia and elsewhere

Peter Vickerman et al. Drug Alcohol Depend. .

Abstract

Zeiler et al. (2010) use a simple model to project the potential prevention utility of using pegylated interferon and ribavirin to treat active injecting drug users (IDUs) for HCV infection. Their analysis shows that increasing the level of HCV treatment in Australia could dramatically reduce the prevalence of HCV infection among IDUs. We argue that their projections are under-estimating the possible impact of HCV treatment because their assumed prevalence of active HCV infection in Australia is too high (assumed prevalence of acute plus chronic is 60%) and their model effectively assumes a treatment efficacy of 33%. We replicate their model and show that if these issues are corrected (assuming 45% prevalence of active HCV infection, i.e. ∼60% antibody prevalence and 50% treatment efficacy), then substantially greater impact can be achieved. In addition, we show that the effect of HCV treatment on the primary prevention of HCV increases in populations with lower background HCV prevalence. We also query their finding that HCV treatment should be preferentially targeted to IDUs not on methadone maintenance treatment.

PubMed Disclaimer

Comment on

Similar articles

Cited by

Publication types

MeSH terms

LinkOut - more resources