The following article written by Michael Ollove was published in Stateline on May 19, 2014.
The U.S. is in the midst of a hepatitis C epidemic with as many as 3.9 million Americans infected with the liver-damaging virus. Aggressively targeting a concentrated population with the contagious but curable disease could be the best approach to eradicating the deadly virus.
The most logical place to launch the counterattack is in the country’s jails and prisons, where the infection rate is about 17 percent, compared to 1 percent to 2 percent overall in the U.S., said Josiah Rich, a Brown University infectious disease physician. A recent study estimated that 1.86 million people with the virus were incarcerated.
“With more than 10 million Americans cycling in and out of prisons and jails each year, including nearly one of every three HCV (hepatitis C)-infected people,” Rich said, “the criminal justice system may be the best place to efficiently identify and cure the greatest number of HCV-infected people.”
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