Dr. Chris Steingart believes every person should get tested for Hepatitis C at some point in their lives.
“It’s simple to test for and it’s easly curable,” Steingart said on Friday, World Hepatitis Day.
“It’s still something that the public doesn’t have a ton of general knowledge about,” he said.
Steingart is the Executive Director of Waterloo-based Sanguen Health Centre, an organization that strives to meet the needs of those in Waterloo Region and Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph living with or at risk for Hepatitis C.
Sanguen provides education, outreach, support, and comprehensive, expert medical care.
“We’ve been able to treat and cure Hepatitis C since the early 2000s, but over the last couple of years we’ve got much better, easier to take treatments. It’s as simple as a pill a day for eight to 12 weeks with close to a 100 per cent cure rate.”
He said that’s all the more reason to get information to people that they should get treated.
“If we did everything right, we could live in a world without Hepatitis C,” Steingart said.
On Friday Sanguen was in St. George’s Square in Downtown Guelph along with other community partners helping spread information about Hepatitis C as part of World Hepatitis Day.
“The new treatment that we have is really effective and it’s accessible. It’s not the same treatment we had five or six years ago,” said Becki Linder, the youth outreach worker for ARCH, the HIV/AIDS Resources and Community Health (ARCH) that works closely with Sanguen.
Steingart said that treating people with Hepatitis C involves a more holistic approach, as they often have other issues that can accompany Hepatitis C: including addiction and other mental health concerns.
But it’s not limited to that segment of society.
Many baby boomers suffer from Hepatitis C through infection, often unknown infection, through blood transfusions prior to 1992, when testing of the blood supply started.
“One of the difficulties we have is that 40 to 60 per cent of the people that have Hepatitis C don’t know it,” Steingart said.
“I’ve seen so many people that don’t fit into one of the risk categories that end up getting tested and find out they have Hepatitis C.”
Thus the push for everyone to get tested.
“You can live for years without symptoms,” Linder said.
More information on Sanguen and on Hepatitis C can be found at www.sanguen.com.
