13 April 2018, Paris, France: Two nationwide programmes in Georgia and Iceland, which were designed to eliminate hepatitis C virus (HCV) at the population level, have reported encouraging results, suggesting that these countries could be on target to achieve their elimination goals. Although both programmes have adopted slightly different approaches, both have reported high levels of engagement, initiation of direct-acting antiviral agents (DAAs), and cure among patients chronically infected with HCV.
Worldwide, 71 million people are estimated to have chronic hepatitis C infection,1 resulting in an estimated 700,000 deaths per year from hepatocellular carcinoma or cirrhosis.2 The availability of oral, well-tolerated DAAs that can achieve cure rates of over 95% has led to the development of World Health Organization (WHO) elimination targets that propose a 90% reduction in HCV incidence and a 65% reduction in HCV-related mortality by 2030.1
Georgia programme: latest data
The world’s first hepatitis C elimination programme was initiated in Georgia in collaboration with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and with a commitment from Gilead Sciences to donate DAAs.15 The programme was initiated in April 2015,3 and the results from its first 2 years in action were presented today at The International Liver Congress™ 2018 in Paris, France.
‘In Georgia, we have set out to achieve 90-95-95 targets by 2020, which means that we want to diagnose 90% of all HCV-infected individuals, we want to treat 95% of those diagnosed, and we want to cure 95% of those treated’, explained Professor Tengiz Tsertsvadze from the Infectious Diseases, AIDS and Clinical Immunology Research Center in Tbilisi, Georgia. ‘We had previously estimated that there were around 150,000 adults with HCV infection living in Georgia, which represents a prevalence in our population of 5.4%’.4
Hepatitis C screening programmes began in Georgia in 2015 and, by the end of April 2017, 43,989 individuals (29.3% of the estimated total population) had been diagnosed with HCV infection and registered with the elimination programme. A total of 33,673 individuals had initiated treatment with DAAs, and 24,273 individuals had achieved a sustained virological response (SVR), i.e. were cured.