Hep C rate has officials puzzled

Kent’s hepatitis C rate continues to land above the Ontario average, but local health officials can’t determine whether these were newly or previously acquired incidents.

There were 50 confirmed cases of the infectious disease in the municipality in 2016, down from a peak year of 70 cases in 2015, according to a report from the Chatham-Kent Public Health Unit.

However, Chatham-Kent’s rate per 100,000 people was 51.8 to Ontario’s 30.7 when adjusted for a comparable age structure.

The local number has exceeded provincial statistics every year since at least 2009.

Stanley Ing, an epidemiologist with the health unit and the report’s author, said the statistics provided by Public Health Ontario do not say when the transmissions occurred.

“We aren’t able to ... indicate if it is increased transmission, so new cases in the community, or if it’s cases that are only being detected now, but they were acquired maybe five, 10, 20 years ago,” he said following last week’s Chatham-Kent Board of Health meeting.

Ing said the health unit will be working with the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care to update the case definition for hepatitis C to include this type of information.

“We’ll be able to say to our community if there is actually a concern at this time,” he said.

The current information also does not say whether or not someone’s infection has been resolved.

Patients reported injection drug use as the top risk factor for hepatitis C infection with 77.4 per cent of responses.

Other risks included tattoos and piercings at 22.1 per cent, followed by exposure to blood or bodily fluids at 18.4 per cent and receipt of invasive procedures such as blood and organ donation at 16.6 per cent.