Awareness Raising Is Working
From the Sunday Times today, an article saying that a stint in rehab has become a rite of passage for celebs wanting to escape the spotlight. Sarah Benjamin writes:
Rehab, I discovered, comes with it own complicated caste system. Your drug of choice defines who you are and which gang you hang out with. The alcoholics look down on the drug users and vice versa. The cocaine crowd think they are superior to the heroin users (more glamorous) while the heroin addicts scorn the coke-head as light weights. Near the bottom of the food chain is the confused housewife who has been abusing her prescription drugs, and even lower than that comes the unfortunate “foodie”.
There is even one-upmanship about what strain of hepatitis C addicts are infected with: genotype 1 has the worst prognosis, so confers greater status of suffering.
So we are now beginning to see references to Hepatitis C in articles in the mainstream press.
With the “coming out” of Anita Roddick on the subject a few weeks ago and the stepping up of the Face-It Campaign – there are radio commercials on Virgin Radio daily now, the HepC profile is really being raised.
More people are showing up on the Forum and joining - the numbers are increasing month on month.
Awareness raising is working.