Pubdate: Sun, 10 May 2015
Source: San Diego Union Tribune (CA)
Copyright: 2015 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.
Contact:  http://www.utsandiego.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/386
Note: Seldom prints LTEs from outside it's circulation area.
Author: Don Sapatkin, Tribune News Service

PAINKILLER ADDICTION SPAWNS RISING HEPATITIS C THREAT

Public health officials are bracing for a new wave of hepatitis C 
infections, one unleashed by the epidemic of prescription painkiller addiction.

The blood-borne virus, on the decline nationally until a few years 
ago, is rising rapidly among adolescents and young adults, especially 
in white, rural communities. Those are the same areas where an 
epidemic of prescription opioid deaths first showed up more than a 
decade ago, followed by a wave of heroin deaths.

Most of the new hepatitis C patients have contracted the virus by 
injecting drugs, often crushed pain pills. For infectious disease, 
that's riskier.

Scattered studies around the country have detected the patterns, 
which became clearer on with a report released this past week by the 
U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Less clear but increasingly expected is a rise in the better-known, 
more-feared virus that often accompanies hepatitis C: HIV.

In rural southeastern Indiana, 150 cases of HIV have been identified 
in the past few months, most of them in a town of 4,200 residents. 
The vast majority injected drugs. Nearly all were also with hepatitis 
C, which is more easily transmitted by shared needles than HIV.

In the CDC study of disease patterns, the number of new hepatitis C 
infections among people age 30 and younger in Kentucky, Tennessee, 
Virginia, and West Virginia rose 364 percent from 2006 to 2012; 
three-quarters of the cases involved injected-drug use. Increases 
were reported everywhere, but "nonurban areas" - basically rural and 
suburban counties - went up at double the rate of urban locations, 
where the virus historically has circulated more.

Jon E. Zibbell, a medical anthropologist and lead author of the 
study, said in an interview that new infections are rising in older 
Americans as well - up 150 percent overall between 2010 and 2013, 
according to CDC data.

Hepatitis C can sit silently in the body for decades before causing 
liver damage so severe in some cases that only a transplant will prevent death.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom