HCV News Week Ending 11/09/2015 Feds Worry That Low-Income People May Not Get Hepatitis Cure 'Confronting the consequences of high-priced drugs, the Obama administration Thursday pointedly reminded states that they cannot legally restrict access by low-income people to revolutionary cures for liver-wasting hepatitis C infection. The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services also sent letters to several drug manufacturers, requesting details of what they are doing to make their medications more affordable. The moves echoed government pressure decades ago to make sure that low-income people covered by federal-state Medicaid programs had access to ground-breaking HIV treatments.' Prescription Drugs: Advancing Ideas to Improve Access, Affordability, and Innovation 'Recently, prescription drugs have been in the news a lot, particularly with respect to their cost. Millions of Americans rely on prescription medications to manage chronic illnesses or treat acute conditions, and drug innovation has resulted in better health outcomes for people across our nation. Because of this, finding ways to improve affordability and access for patients, supporting and increasing innovation in the industry, and - most importantly - making people healthier has become an area of significant interest to many.' Primrose Healthcare Provides an Innovative Calculator Tool, Giving Insight into the Costs of Hepatitis C beyond Anti-Virals 'Primrose Healthcare has just launched an innovative calculator tool to help health insurers and other payers uncover and better understand the total costs associated with the hepatitis C virus (HCV) within their populations. The calculator references the data and analysis from the Milliman, Inc. study, "The burden of hepatitis C virus disease in commercial and managed Medicaid populations," and other user-input assumptions to estimate costs for a payer's specific population.' Dashboard Bolsters VA Efforts to Identify and Treat Veterans With Hep C and Liver Disease 'The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is stepping up its efforts to accelerate treatment for Veterans with hepatitis C and advanced liver disease (ALD) through the creation of a Hepatitis C-ALD dashboard. The dashboard works by using a set of criteria, including age, gender, geography, service era along with and race and ethnicity, to distinguish Veteran groups at highest risk for ALD as a result of hepatitis C.' New Syringe Design Not Particularly Effective at Curbing Spread of Hepatitis C Virus 'As many as 21 million people worldwide inject drugs, putting them at heightened risk for infection from blood-borne pathogens such as the hepatitis C virus (HCV), especially if syringes are shared. A newer type of syringe designed to reduce HCV transmission by decreasing the so-called dead space-the volume that exists between the syringe hub and needle in comparison to standard and widely used high dead space designs-is not particularly effective, a new Yale School of Public Health-led study has found.' Advanced Biological Laboratories (ABL) Launches HIV and HCV DeepChek® SingleRound Genotyping and Sequencing Assays 'Today Advanced Biological Laboratories (ABL) announced the launch of the DeepChek® SingleRound HIV and Hepatitis C Virus (HCV) Genotyping and Sequencing assays.These two assays are the first in its virology reagents portfolio. The DeepChek® SingleRound assays are currently available for Research Use Only.'
