‘Free love’ has hepatitis legacy
Baby boomers who came of age during the ‘‘free love era’’ are being encouraged to take new hepatitis C tests.
About 50,000 people in New Zealand have chronic hepatitis C but only half of them know.
Clinical nurse specialist Bin Heaphy said anyone who ticked one of six risk-factor boxes, which covered ‘‘a lot of the population’’, should get the new, simple fingerprick test.
‘‘It is associated with piercings, tattoos, intravenous events and drug use ... there are huge amounts of discrimination around the virus but it was not uncommon to use drugs in the 60s and early 70s – it was the free love era. So a lot of people might have only injected or used drugs once but they’ve ended up with hep C,’’ she said.
The six risk factors were: injected drugs (even only once), received a tattoo or body piercing with non-sterile equipment,
lived or received medical attention in a high-risk country (Southeast Asia, China, Eastern Europe, including Russia, or the Middle East),
had a blood transfusion prior to 1992, been in prison, born to a mother living with hepatitis C.
Symptoms could include tiredness, joint pain, loss of appetite, nausea and abdominal pain, but the ‘‘major one’’ was liver cancer. Most people did not get diagnosed until close to 50 years old, even though the majority were infected in their 20s, Heaphy said. In Marlborough and Nelson, where Heaphy works, there was a nine-month waiting list for a liver scan before treatment could start.
But a new community-funded FibroScan machine, essentially a virtual liver biopsy, meant the scan could be done outside hospital. The finger-prick blood test gave the patient a result instantly, Heaphy said.
She said new, simpler treatments were also now available.