U.S. OKs new drug to treat hepatitis C

U.S. regulators have approved the first drug to treat all forms of hepatitis C in as little as eight weeks.

The pill combination from AbbVie Inc. was approved Thursday by the Food and Drug Administration for adults without significant cirrhosis, a type of liver disease, and many patients who were not cured by prior treatment.

Mavyret joins two other AbbVie hepatitis C drugs, one from Merck & Co. and four from Gilead Sciences Inc. on the market. That gives doctors and patients more options.

An estimated 2.7 million to 3.9 million Americans have hepatitis C, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It usually develops slowly over decades, with no symptoms until serious damage is done. Without treatment, the virus can cause liver failure and liver cancer, often requiring a liver transplant or resulting in death.

For decades, hepatitis C treatment required a year of gruelling shots and pills that gave patients flu-like symptoms and still barely cured half of them. Starting late in 2013, Gilead revolutionized treatment with the first pill-only medicines that brought cures in 12 weeks for more than 90 per cent of patients. Euthanasia used for 4.5 per cent of deaths in the Netherlands Euthanasia has become “common practice” in the Netherlands, accounting for 4.5 per cent of deaths, according to researchers who say requests are increasing from people who aren’t terminally ill.

In 2002, the Netherlands became the first country in the world that made it legal for doctors to help people die. Both euthanasia, where doctors actively kill patients, and assisted suicide, where physicians prescribe patients a lethal dose of drugs, are allowed. People must be “suffering unbearably” with no hope of relief — but their condition does not have to be fatal.

“It looks like patients are now more willing to ask for euthanasia and physicians are more willing to grant it,” said lead author Dr. Agnes van der Heide of Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam.

The 25-year review published in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine is based on physician questionnaires. The use of euthanasia and assisted suicide “to relieve end-of-life suffering has become common practice in the Netherlands,” the authors said in the report.

About 8 per cent of the people who died in 2015 asked for help dying, the review showed.

Researchers said about half of all requests are approved now, compared to about a third in previous years.

Scott Kim, a bioethicist at the U.S. National Institutes of Health who was not part of the study, said the report raises concerns, particularly in regards to people seeking euthanasia due to age-related issues.

“These are old people who may have health problems, but none of them are life-threatening. They’re old, they can’t get around, their friends are dead and their children don’t visit anymore,” he said.

“This kind of trend cries out for a discussion. Do we think their lives are still worthwhile?”

Euthanasia is also legal in Belgium, Canada, Colombia and Luxembourg. Switzerland, Germany and six U.S. states allow assisted suicide.

Some experts said that the euthanasia experience in the Netherlands offered lessons to other countries debating similar legislation. Zika virus brings new form to dating Florida recorded its first sexually transmitted Zika virus case this year, according to the Florida Department of Health.

The confirmed case, on Florida’s west coast, involved a person who has not travelled recently but has a partner who recently travelled to Cuba and later tested positive for Zika.

There is no evidence of transmission through mosquitoes taking place anywhere in Florida, officials said.

There have been 118 Zika virus cases already reported in Florida. Of those, 90 are travel-related, 22 others were from undetermined exposure and 81 are pregnant women.

Officials say it’s important that anyone who travels to an area overseas where Zika is prevalent should prevent mosquito bites for at least three weeks after they return to Florida.