Cherokee Nation lauded for its elimination effort
TAHLEQUAH, Okla. — Recovering addict Judith Anderson figures if she hadn’t entered a program that caught and treated the hepatitis C she contracted after years of intravenous drug use, she wouldn’t be alive to convince others to get checked out.
The 74-year-old resident of Sallisaw, Okla. — about 160 miles east of Oklahoma City — said the potentially fatal liver disease sapped her of energy and “any desire to go anywhere or do anything.”
“It was like living with a death sentence,” she said of the infection that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in 2016 killed more people than HIV and tuberculosis combined.
But things changed for Anderson, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, because she took advantage of the tribe’s aggressive program to test for and treat hepatitis C. Federal officials say it could serve as a national model in the fight against the infection.
The Cherokees, the second-largest tribe in the U.S. after the Navajo Nation, started the program three years ago looking to screen 80,000 of its 350,000 citizens, mainly targeting those 20 to 65 because of their statistically higher chances of having the disease. More than half of the target group has been screened, with more than 1,300 citizens testing positive, and a 90 percent cure rate among those who have started treatment, the tribe says.
CDC official John Ward, whose agency is providing technical assistance to the tribe, said the Cherokees are the first community to set such an ambitious goal to eliminate the disease.
“It’s a trailblazing project for the entire country,” Ward said.
The Cherokees, who operate the largest tribal health care system in the U.S., are shouldering the cost of the program. The Tahlequah-based tribe is also capitalizing on medical advances that have seen the cost of the antiviral drugs used to treat the disease plummet from around $90,000 per patient just a few years ago to between $15,000 and $20,000.
Hepatitis C is spread through infected blood, and hundreds tested positive for the disease in the Cherokee program after injecting drugs with unclean needles. Tribal health officials blame the nation’s opioid crisis for the increase in those cases.
The Cherokee Nation is suing several major drug distributors for what it claims is the companies’ failure to prevent the flow of illegally prescribed opioids to its citizens.