Scientists cast doubt on mass hepatitis C testing

Widespread screening for hepatitis C — a recommendation of public health agencies, including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — may be premature, some scientists argue.

In a paper published in the British Medical Journal, the scientists say there’s little concrete evidence that screening all baby boomers for hepatitis C will save lives. Plus screening and treatment could cause unnecessary harm to millions of people who test positive for the virus but never experience any ill effects from it, they say.

Dr. John Ioannidis, a Stanford University epidemiologist and an author of the paper, said that instead of rolling out widespread screening programs, researchers should start a randomized trial to test the usefulness of screening and who may benefit from it.

It is thought that 2.7 million Americans have hepatitis C. Most of those people were born between 1945 and 1965, epidemiologists say, and most don’t know they carry the virus.

In the past few years, new drugs have become available that can cure the most common type of hepatitis C in more than 90 percent of patients. Those can cost up to $84,000 for a standard 12-week course of treatment, but they’re a vast improvement over earlier thera- pies that had severe side effects and often didn’t work.

Hepatitis C is caused by a virus that typically is spread through contact with infected blood. Baby boomers could have become infected from intravenous drug use, unsafe tattoos or contaminated blood transfusions done before safer practices were introduced.

Erin Allday