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Acute Hepatitis C Infection: New Approaches to Surveillance, Treatment and Prevention

  • Global Perspectives: Australia (W Sievert, Section Editor)
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Abstract

In high-income countries, hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is predominantly acquired through injecting drug use. Acute HCV, generally considered to be the first 6 months of HCV infection, remains underdiagnosed since new infections are most often asymptomatic and there are practical problems in surveillance and testing individuals at high-risk of infection. While the chronic HCV treatment landscape is changing rapidly with the advent of direct acting anti-viral agents, treatment recommendations for acute HCV infection are based on smaller, largely observational studies and all regimens still include pegylated-interferon. This review considers surveillance and diagnostic strategies as individual and population-based approaches to managing acute HCV, examines current evidence for acute treatment particularly among people who inject drugs, and discusses recent literature modeling the impact of treatment on HCV epidemiology and its cost-effectiveness.

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Acknowledgments

JD, RSD, AT and MH acknowledges fellowship support from the National Health and Medical Research Council. JD, RSD and MH acknowledge the contribution to this work of the NHMRC Centre for Research Excellence in Injecting Drug Use and the Victorian Operational Infrastructure Support Program (Department of Health, Victoria, Australia) to the Burnet Institute.

Disclosure

JS Doyle: none; R Sacks-Davis: none; ME Hellard: received research support from Roche Pharmaceuticals, which provided PEG-IFN for the Australian Trial of Acute Hepatitis C therapy.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Population Health, Burnet Institute, 85 Commercial Road, Melbourne, VIC, 3004, Australia

    Joseph S. Doyle, Rachel Sacks-Davis & Margaret E. Hellard

  2. Infectious Diseases Unit, The Alfred Hospital, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Joseph S. Doyle & Margaret E. Hellard

  3. Department of Epidemiology and Preventative Medicine, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Joseph S. Doyle, Rachel Sacks-Davis & Margaret E. Hellard

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  1. Joseph S. Doyle
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Doyle, J.S., Sacks-Davis, R. & Hellard, M.E. Acute Hepatitis C Infection: New Approaches to Surveillance, Treatment and Prevention. Curr Hepatitis Rep 11, 221–230 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11901-012-0143-5

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