Critics push back against hepatitis C screening advice
Say boomers should be tested
When Walter Buchanan learned his brother-in-law needed a liver transplant because of advanced cirrhosis caused by a long-undiagnosed infection with hepatitis C, he offered to donate part of his organ to save his life.
But Buchanan was shocked when doctors told him he couldn’t be a donor – tests revealed that he, too, carried the virus and that his liver was severely scarred, even though he’d experienced no symptoms.
“When they told me, my mind just went deep-six,” he says from his home in Queensville, Ont., just north of Toronto. “And my first question was: ‘OK, how long do I have?’
“That’s what scares people the most about hep C, because people think ‘Oh my God, it’s a death sentence.’”
Hepatitis C can indeed kill. Over time, the virus causes cirrhosis, which can lead to liver failure. About 10 per cent of those with advanced cirrhosis go on to develop liver cancer.
But damage from hepatitis C can take decades to manifest and cause noticeable symptoms; many people have no idea they harbour the virus – hence its moniker as a “silent killer.”
At 67, Buchanan is part of the baby boomer generation, the group that makes up roughly a quarter of Canada’s population. Liver specialists contend people born between 1945 and 1965 are at the greatest risk of having been unknowingly infected by the blood-borne virus, which wasn’t even identified until 1989.
Yet recently released hepatitis C screening guidelines from the
“That’s what scares people the most about hep C, because people think ‘Oh my God, it’s a death sentence.’”
Walter Buchanan
Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care recommend against routine testing of baby boomers – or adults of any age – unless an individual has one or more risk factors, including a history of IV drug use; travel to or immigration from hepatitis C-endemic countries; or a blood transfusion or organ transplant before 1992, when donations weren’t tested for the virus.
That recommendation has dismayed many hepatologists (liver doctors), infectious disease physicians and researchers who have long preached that all boomers should be tested for the virus, in part because they grew up at a time when doctors and dentists gave vaccinations and freezing with reusable and often inadequately sterilized needles.
Experimentation with injection drugs and potentially unsafe sex among this age group during their teenaged and young adult lives could also have ratcheted up the spread of the virus.
An estimated 250,000 to 300,000 Canadians are infected with hepatitis C, and studies suggest 45 to 70 per cent – about two-thirds of them baby boomers – have no idea they carry the virus.
“Hepatitis C is like having a ticking time bomb in your liver,” says Michael Houghton, a researcher at the University of Alberta who first identified hepatitis C with co-investigators while working in the U.S. and then developed a blood test for the virus.