Week 24 - More on HepC in the News
I recently wrote about the news item (Week 23 - Hepatitis C In The News Today) that 2000 women across the UK are being asked to undertake blood tests because a gynaecologist could have infected them with hepC. I wrote my comments about this with passion, perhaps underlined with some ‘riba-rage’ ranting. Two main issues bothered me. Media awareness about Hepatitis C being raised in a ‘bad news’ context more successfully than educative and proactive articles. And secondly the lack of evidence of a proactive stance on the ‘protection of the public’ issue.
In a comment reply, Sue in Toronto wonders how it could happen with standardised precautions and procedures in the medical profession and hypothesises that transmission could be higher from other professionals not as clearly monitored. She also disagrees with the notion of forced public disclosure for hcv-infected professionals.
The latter point is one I can easily agree with. Any proactive programme to ‘protect the public’ does not have to include public disclosure about any individual’s HepC status. They can, and should, be mutually exclusive issues.
The doctor concerned in this news story is a gynaecologist and, amazingly, has worked in 25 hospitals in Britain and Scotland. Local newspapers are now reporting on the implications for patients in their area and ‘outraged’ patients are complain.
Dee in Philadelphia comments that the Sun newspaper identifies this as an isolated incident. Well, other newspapers quote research from medical professionals that there are between 200 - 500 thousand people undiagnosed in this country at the moment. The Sun can say it is an isolated incident - I say it is only the first incident. How can there not be other medical professionals with that amount of undetected HepC about? And following Sue’s point, there are no doubt other types of professionals too who could unknowingly be infecting their clients, patients and customers.
I came across another article in the Independent newspaper this week revealing more stats about HepC amongst the medical profession and that profession’s response. I will comment further on this in another posting.