Hepatitis C: The beginning of the end—key elements for successful European and national strategies to eliminate HCV in Europe

Summary
Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is a major public health problem in the European Union (EU). An estimated 5.6 million Europeans are chronically infected with a wide range of variation in prevalence across European Union countries. Although HCV continues to spread as a largely “silent pandemic,” its elimination is made possible through the availability of the new antiviral drugs and the implementation of preven‐tion practices.

On 17 February 2016, the Hepatitis B & C Public Policy Association held the first EU HCV Policy Summit in Brussels. This summit was an historic event as it was the first high-level conference focusing on the elimination of HCV at the European Union level.

The meeting brought together the main stakeholders in the field of HCV: clinicians, patient advocacy groups, representatives of key institutions and regional bodies from across European Union; it served as a platform for one of the most significant disease elimination campaigns in Europe and culminated in the presentation of the HCV Elimination Manifesto, calling for the elimination of HCV in Europe by 2030.

The launch of the Elimination Manifesto provides a starting point for action in order to make HCV and its elimination in Europe an explicit public health priority, to ensure that patients, civil society groups and other relevant stakeholders will be directly involved in developing and implementing HCV elimination strategies, to pay particular attention to the links between hepatitis C and social marginalization and to introduce a European Hepatitis Awareness Week.

To read the full article on Wiley go to http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jvh.2018.25.issue-S1/issuetoc

Contributors:

G. V. Papatheodoridis¹ | A. Hatzakis¹ | E. Cholongitas¹ | R. Baptista-Leite^2,3 |
I. Baskozos⁴ | J. Chhatwal⁵ | M. Colombo⁶ | H. Cortez-Pinto^7,8 | A. Craxi⁹ |
D. Goldberg¹⁰ | C. Gore¹¹ | A. Kautz¹² | J. V. Lazarus^13,14 | L. Mendão^15,16 |
M. Peck-Radosavljevic¹⁷ | H. Razavi¹⁸ | E. Schatz¹⁹ | N. Tözün²⁰ | P. van Damme^21,22 | H. Wedemeyer²³ | Y. Yazdanpanah²⁴ | F. Zuure^25,26 | M. P. Manns²³

REFERENCES:

1. Medical School of National, Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, Greece
2. Institute of Health Sciences, Católica University of Portugal, Lisbon, Portugal
3. Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands
4. Ministry of Health, Athens, Greece
5. Massachusetts General Hospital’ s, Institute for Technology Assessment and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
6. Clinical and Research Center Humanitas, Rozzano, Italy
7. European Association for the Study of the Liver, Geneva, Switzerland
8. Faculdade de Medicina, Universidade de Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal
9. University of Palermo, Palermo, Italy
10. School of Health and Life Sciences, Glasgow Caledonian University, Glasgow, Scotland, UK
11. Hepatitis C Trust, World Hepatitis Alliance, London, UK
12. Leberhilfe Projekt gUG, Cologne, Germany
13. Barcelonai Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), Hospital Clínic, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
14. CHIP, Rigshospitalet, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
15. Portuguese Activist Group for HIV/AIDS Treatment, Lisbon, Portugal
16. European AIDS Treatment Group, Brussels, Belgium
17. Department of Internal Medicine and Gastroenterology, Klagenfurt, Austria
18. Center for Disease Analysis, Lafayette, CO, USA
19. Correlation Network, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
20. Acibadem Mehmet Ali Aydinlar University, Istanbul, Turkey
21. Antwerp University, Antwerp, Belgium
22. Viral Hepatitis Prevention Board, Antwerp, Belgium
23. Hannover Medical School, Hannover, Germany
24. INSERM, Université Paris Diderot, Paris, France
25. Department of Infectious Diseases Research and Prevention, Public Health Service of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
26. Department of Internal Medicine, Amsterdam Infection and Immunity Institute (AI&II), Academic Medical Center, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands