Despite the huge disparities in care that were highlighted, last week's Standard
of Care for HIV and Coinfections in Europe meeting in Bucharest featured discussions
that could form the basis of a European-wide exercise to audit HIV centres
to a common standard. As well as highlighting the difficulties facing clinicians
tackling the needs of people co-infected with HIV and tuberculosis (TB), the meeting also
looked at the needs of people with viral hepatitis and specifically hepatitis
C.
Dr Jerzy Jaroszewicz of the Polish Association for the Study
of the Liver said that given there is a World Health Organization (WHO) target
that by 2030 90% of people with hepatitis C should know their status, we have a
long way to go. It's currently estimated that 13% are aware of their
status (globally), with one-third diagnosed in Europe as a whole.
The big gap in Europe is lack of treatment. Here
the WHO target is for 80% of those diagnosed to receive direct-acting
antivirals (DAAs) by 2030; last year it was estimated that 13% of those
diagnosed
received treatment (2.5% of all those with hepatitis C).
One of the problems is, as it is with TB, that most of the
population that have co-infection with hepatitis C and HIV are former or current
injecting drug users, especially in eastern Europe and central Asia.
Here, although the proportions are shifting, it is still the
case that 45% of people currently living with HIV got it through injecting
drugs. Because the vast majority of people who inject drugs and have HIV
also have hepatitis C, 93% of those in the region who have hepatitis C/HIV co-infection
are injecting drug users.
Although the mortality threat facing people with co-infection is
not as acute as it is for people with HIV/TB co-infection in the region, longer-term
outcomes for those co-infected with untreated hepatitis C are still worse than
for those who only have HIV, even controlling for other health risks faced by
injecting drug users. A long-term Polish study of people with HIV found that 20
years after diagnosis, 19% of people with HIV had died but 40% of those with hepatitis C co-infection had.
Dr Jaroszewicz said that population-wide screening for hepatitis
C was not necessarily cost-effective, citing US studies that only found relatively
small prevalences of hepatitis C in youth, and a lower acceptance rate and slow
referral process in prisoners offered a hepatitis C test at reception.
There were countries and cities that had taken the decision
to implement intensified hepatitis C screening and universal treatment. New York
and Australia were examples outside Europe, and there
is evidence from Australia, in particular, that this is resulting in falls
in hepatitis C prevalence.
In Europe, Iceland is the first example of a country that
has implemented a national hepatitis C elimination plan targeted at, though not
exclusive to, injecting drug users. Its TraP Hep C elimination programme,
started in January 2016, is a cohesive, multipronged approach that includes
scale-up of prevention, testing and early treatment of hepatitis C in both
hospital and community settings. By 2018 it was estimated that between 56 and
70% of Iceland’s hepatitis C-positive population had been treated with DAAs.
However, in order to implement this, a multidisciplinary
public health model of care and co-operation between government, health
services, the penitentiary system and community organisations was needed.
The barrier was not one of treatment guidelines, Dr
Jaroszewicz said. The majority of European countries where DAAs were available
at all now offered reimbursed DAAs at relatively low levels of liver fibrosis. It
was lack of other measures to control hepatitis C and HIV infections in
injecting drug users.
Modelling studies showed that DAAs in themselves would make little difference
to the transmission of hepatitis C in eastern Europe and central Asia. A modelling study of
hepatitis C prevention and treatment provision in five countries (Belarus, Georgia,
Moldova, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan) found that, by themselves, adding DAA availability
to current provision would only reduce new hepatitis C infections by 1 to 14%,
depending on the country.
In contrast simply providing needle and syringe exchange
would reduce infections by 10 to 25%, and adding opioid substitution therapy (OST)
to that would reduce infections by 45 to 55%. Adding in DAAs to that would further
reduce new infections, but not by all that much: about 5% more. Finally, if targeted
screening programmes were also added, reductions could range from 55% in
Tajikistan to 70% in Moldova.
One big problem is that there is an overall lack of co-ordination
of agreement on programmes to test more people for hepatitis C in Europe. Dagmar
Hedrich of the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction said
that even now only 50% of people referred for opioid addiction treatment in
Europe were tested for hepatitis C.
Dr Jürgen Rockstroh, currently EACS President, said that
although in his clinic in Bonn, Germany 97% of people testing positive for
hepatitis C had been treated, the problem was that even in Germany there was a
lack of any coherent programme to diagnose people with hepatitis C.
One example of such a programme, he said, would be to
include liver enzyme tests among the standard medical tests provided to anyone
over 35 who gets a health checkup. However, this idea has faced opposition from
the insurance companies that reimburse health costs in Germany because they
feared a sudden increase in patients needing expensive DAAs – even though
treating people early would in the longer run save money by reducing
infections.
Dr Adrian Streinu-Cercel of Romania’s National Institute for
Infectious Diseases said that there was an issue of “wide eligibility, but low
accessibility” in many European countries of both hepatitis C testing and of
treatment.
A lot of this was due to the continued lack of provision of
other forms of harm reduction for injecting drug users, which means that many
continued to use street drugs and dropped out of treatment. Dr
Streinu-Cercel commented that although OST was available
in Romania in theory, it was rationed in practice. When Romania had entered the
EU it had promised to treat 12% of its injecting drug users with OST but was currently
only treating 7%.
Issues like police harassment of injecting drug users was
still a big problem, he said. “Although we provide needle and syringe exchange
and the police say they will not harass people who come for them, in practice
what happens is that after people leave, the police have secured the rooms our
service users have occupied to find evidence of the drugs they have injected
and will then charge them.”
WHO’s Elena Vovc said that part of the problem, as with
TB, was that in parts of Europe treatment for drug dependency was the
responsibility of non-HIV specialists who had a narrow focus on treating
addiction rather than
its health consequences. “You tend to get the narcologists taking over
and
wanting to treat people for addition, but infectious disease and public
health get
left out.” WHO’s own structure, which was led by the health policies of
individual countries, was an issue here too.
Dr Michel Katzatchkine, the French HIV specialist who was
director of the Global Fund from 2007 to 2014, and who is now the UN Special
Envoy on HIV in central and eastern Europe, said that WHO guidelines needed to
be updated too. The WHO guidelines on harm reduction dated from 2012. There
were a few updates since then, but they had been “discreet," he said. "Where are the guidelines
on
safe injecting rooms? Naloxone
provision for overdose? Heroin-assisted
therapy?”
Dr Streinu-Cercel concurred, saying that this was a problem
for monitoring and surveillance too: “The drug specialists do collect data on
drug use and health outcomes – I have seen a paper linking benzodiazepine use
to car crashes – but access to such data for research data tends to be
restricted.”
Dr Kazatchkine commented: “We’re in a region where 1.9
million people who inject drugs have hepatitis C and 750,000 of those have HIV.
One per cent of them are accessing OST, and the average annual allocation of
clean syringes is 15 each. This is a health emergency.
“Physicians have to be more vocal about this. Where there is
a conflict between legislation and public health, it is legislation that should
be changed.”