Posted on July 30, 2026 by HCV Dashboard Admin

People who use drugs (PWUD) are at the highest risk for acquiring hepatitis C.  The New York State (

​NYS) Hepatitis C Elimination plan has identified PWUD as the priority population for elimination.  New treatments available to cure hepatitis C should be made accessible to PWUD.  Guidelines support treating PWUD, even those actively using.

As shown by data from the three low-threshold models of hepatitis C treatment among PWUD funded by the AIDS Institute’s Office of Hepatitis Health Care and Epidemiology (OHHCE), high cure rates among PWUD are possible, especially when paired with supportive services including harm reduction and medication for opioid use disorder. 

Rural communities in the United States have been disproportionately affected by the opioid epidemic, facing higher rates of opioid-related deaths and unique systemic challenges in addressing the crisis. As the opioid crisis surged, the number of new hepatitis C cases increased. From 2004-2014, among people ages 18-29, drug treatment program admissions for injection opioid use increased by 622%. HCV incidence increased by 400% in the same cohort.

​1 Between 2000-2019, HCV rates increased 10-fold among pregnant women with parallel increases in substance use and opioid use disorders.2
In NYS, outside of New York City, rates of hepatitis C are greater in rural areas than urban ones.  According to 2024 NYS hepatitis C case report data, the rate of newly reported hepatitis C cases was higher in rural counties than urban counties outside of NYC (33.0 per 100,000 vs. 20.3 per 100,000 population).  The highest rate was reported in the NY Penn/Binghamton area (33.7 per 100,000).3

​To Continue: https://hcvdashboardny.org/raising-awareness-of-hepatitis-c-in-rural-new-york/Posted on July 30, 2026 by HCV Dashboard Admin

Published July 27, 2026Originally published on ScienceDaily Top Health
MD Linx

One of the largest investigations yet into coffee and liver health has found that people who drink more coffee tend to have lower risks of cirrhosis, liver cancer, and death related to liver disease.
The Cedars-Sinai Health Sciences University study, published in Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology, also uncovered biological patterns that could help explain why coffee consumption has repeatedly been associated with healthier livers.
Previous studies suggested that coffee might benefit the liver, but most were smaller or looked at only one piece of the puzzle," said hepatologist Hyunseok Kim, MD, MPH, PhD, assistant professor of Medicine at Cedars-Sinai and corresponding author of the study. "We followed hundreds of thousands of people for more than a decade and looked at their health outcomes along with liver MRI scans and blood protein analyses. Together, those findings help explain the biological mechanisms behind coffee's association with better liver health."
Study Followed Nearly 355,000 Adults
Researchers examined data from 354,957 UK Biobank participants who had no history of cirrhosis or liver cancer when the study began. Using linked medical records, the team tracked new cases of cirrhosis, liver cancer, and liver-related death over a median period of 13 years.
The results showed that coffee drinkers generally experienced better liver outcomes than people who did not drink coffee.

​TO CONTINUE READING: https://www.mdlinx.com/news/coffee-may-help-shield-the-liver-from-fat-scarring-and-cancer/5IApOObC8RJN7BvEMxtRTd?show_order=7&utm_campaign=reg_daily-alert_2600802_daily-nl-am-v4_registered-users-a180_all&utm_source=iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_content=MorningDaily

For Everyone
May 13, 2026 CDC National Center For HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD, And Tuberculosis Prevention

What to know
A new CDC study shows that treating hepatitis C can save substantial dollars in medical costs, in addition to saving lives and averting suffering.
SummaryA new CDC study finds that providing curative treatment for hepatitis C could result in billions of dollars in medical cost savings, in addition to the known benefits of averting substantial human suffering and saving lives.
This study was published in the journal BMC Health Services Research.

TO CONTINUE:https://www.cdc.gov/nchhstp/whats-new/hepatitis-c-treatment-saves.html​

May 14, 2026
By Maia Szalavitz, Ms. Szalavitz is a contributing Opinion writer who covers addiction and public poli

After rising exponentially since 1979, overdose rates have finally begun to decline, falling more than 29 percent since 2022. President Trump has repeatedly claimed that stopping these fatalities is a priority. But recent moves by his administration threaten to stall or even reverse this progress.

The Trump administration is now enforcing an executive order against what are known as harm reduction approaches, which emphasize keeping people alive over ending their drug use. Such efforts, the order argues, “only facilitate illegal drug use and its attendant harm.”
This new policy makes federal funding available for saving lives after overdoses or treating other harms that have occurred from drug use but prohibits spending on preventing those harms. It reflects the misguided belief that protecting people’s health during drug use enables continued addiction and deters recovery and that harsher consequences spur abstinence. This notion is not only cruel but also false. And it could cost thousands of lives.

On April 24 the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration released two “Dear Colleague” letters, which were sent to state health departments and grant recipients to inform them about the kinds of programs that can and cannot receive federal funding. The letters made clear that many harm reduction approaches would no longer receive the agency’s support.
“SAMHSA guidance carries enormous weight in addiction medicine,” says Dr. Ayesha Appa, an assistant professor of infectious disease and addiction medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Beyond outlining rules on spending, the letters set the tone for professional practice and influence what clinicians may recommend.

While stressing that funding for overdose antidotes and wound care is still acceptable, the first letter bans spending on supplies to prevent such damage — test strips that allow people to determine whether dangerous substances like fentanyl and xylazine are in their drugs and sterilized water to reduce the risk of infected injection wounds. It continues a decades-old prohibition on federal funding for clean needles and bans funding for hotlines that people can call as a safety measure while using drugs. Operators on these hotlines ask for location information from callers and stay on the line, alerting 911 if they believe an overdose occurs.

The second letter to providers focuses on opioid use disorder medications. SAMHSA says it will fund medication for addiction treatment only if other support services such as counseling are involved. It also demands that programs, in conjunction with patients, annually re-evaluate whether addiction medications like methadone and buprenorphine should be stopped, so that treatment doesn’t become “a default sentence to lifelong medication use.”

While those rules sound benign, in reality they will reduce access to the only treatments that are proven to cut the death rate from overdose by 50 percent or more. A recent study found that patients on these medications had an 80 percent reduction in overdose death risk, compared with those participating in treatment programs without medication.
“
Our biggest problem is that too few people are accessing these medications to begin with,” says Dr. Appa, noting that her patients are far more likely to stop medication too early than to linger on it too long. SAMHSA’s new approach, with its stigmatizing implication that medication is a life sentence rather than a lifesaver, is not helpful. Right now, 75 percent of people who could benefit from these medications don’t receive them — and that problem will be exacerbated by Medicaid cuts in the administration’s 2025 domestic policy legislation, which could end insurance for about 1.6 million people with addiction. Around 156,000 people could lose access to their current medications, which experts estimate would lead to 1,000 additional overdose deaths each year.

Research shows that harm reduction programs do not hamper people’s recovery. One study, for example, found that people who frequently use syringe exchange programs are five times as likely to enter treatment as those who participate less. Other studies have found that people who frequently go to overdose prevention centers where they can use drugs under supervision are 40 to 70 percent more likely to get treatment than those who show up less often.

A majority of people with opioid addiction who enter even the best treatment programs relapse at least once, typically many times. This is why experts refer to addiction as a chronic disorder. Harm reduction keeps people alive during these relapses.

TO CONTINUE: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/14/opinion/harm-reduction-addiction-trump.html?campaign_id=2&emc=edit_th_20260515&instance_id=175622&nl=today%27s-headlines&regi_id=35747334&segment_id=219878&user_id=ccde51e4ec9251b4505257eedc2ee927​

• 
  148

Related Content

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
Tell us about yourself. Take the survey.

 This document consolidates, for the first time, WHO recommendations on the prevention, testing, treatment and monitoring of hepatitis B and C.


The WHO Consolidated guidance on hepatitis B and C prevention, testing, treatment, service delivery and monitoring
 (launched March 2026) is a landmark implementation handbook uniting over 80 recommendations (2015–2025). It offers a practical, public health approach for countries to accelerate 2030 elimination targets through simplified, person-centred, and integrated services, covering HBV, HCV, and HDV. 
World Health Organization (WHO) +3

TO CONTINUE:https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240119529​

JAMA  Published Online: March 25, 2026 
Sanjay Kishore, MD1; Margaret Hayden, MD, MPhil1; Micah Johnson, MD2

Since initially becoming available in 2013, direct-acting antivirals (DAAs) have transformed the treatment of hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection. Treatment is well tolerated and results in cure (sustained virologic response) in more than 95% of individuals. However, only about a third of people in the US with HCV infection receive treatment within a year of diagnosis, an estimated 2.5 million to 4 million remain chronically infected, and incident cases of HCV have increased during the last decade.1,2 To better understand how the use of DAAs has evolved in the US, this study measured changes in patient and prescriber characteristics for these medications from 2013 to 2025.

TO READ FULL ARTICLE:https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2846850​

Scripps Research scientists reengineer critical proteins on the surface of HCV, paving the way for a new vaccine design.  March 03, 2026

LA JOLLA, CA--Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infects an estimated 50 million people worldwide, according to the World Health Organization, and remains a leading cause of cirrhosis and liver cancer. While antiviral drugs can cure most infections, global access remains limited and these drugs do not stop reinfection.
This is why a durable vaccine is critically needed. Developing one has proven exceptionally challenging, however, as HCV evades immune detection using two distinct proteins that coat its surface. These proteins, known collectively as the E1E2 glycoprotein complex, have been historically difficult to produce in the stable, native form needed for vaccination.
In a new Nature Communications study, scientists at Scripps Research have now engineered that native-like, stabilized version of HCV’s E1E2 complex and used it to build a nanoparticle-based vaccine candidate. The approach uses a technology called self-assembling protein nanoparticles, or SApNPs, which organizes many copies of the proteins into virus-like clusters that the immune system can more easily recognize. The study was published as an article-in-press on February 11, 2026.
“Our lab focuses on all the major virus families, including those with surface proteins that are too unstable to use in traditional vaccines,” says senior author Jiang Zhu, professor at Scripps Research. “For HCV, the central problem for decades has been that the two surface proteins, E1 and E2, fall apart or misassemble when removed from the virus. In this study, we were able to stabilize the native E1–E2 interface and generate a soluble complex that faithfully mimics the viral surface.”
On HCV’s viral surface, E1 and E2 form tightly linked pairs known as heterodimers. Together, they both shield the virus from immune attack and allow it to attach to and enter human cells. Because vaccines train the immune system to recognize viral proteins, scientists must first recreate accurate copies of them in the lab. However, the E1 and E2 glycoproteins are notoriously difficult and labor-intensive to manufacture: once removed from the virus, they often misfold or fall apart.
For more than two decades, scientists been attempting to produce this stable, soluble E1E2 complex that preserves the correct interface between the two proteins. Without it, vaccines cannot teach the body’s immune system to recognize HCV’s true viral structure. It’s remained a major unsolved challenge in the HCV field at large.

TO CONTINUE: https://www.scripps.edu/news-and-events/press-room/2026/20260303-zhu-nanoparticle-vaccine.html

Marion Delphina [email protected] ∙ Monica Fambroughb ∙ Jana Manningb ∙ Lindsey Hiebert-Suwondob ∙ Jessica Hicksc ∙ Philippa C Matthewsa,d,e
February 18, 2026 , The Lancet, Gastroenterology & Hepatology

Hepatitis B virus (HBV) and hepatitis C virus (HCV) are among the world's leading infectious threats, together responsible for over a million deaths each year, but these infections remain neglected by global funding.1,2 In 2025, the US Government revised its global health priorities and substantially reduced foreign aid commitments,3–5 including cuts to the US Agency for International Development and the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, with estimated reductions totalling around US$60 billion.6,7 HIV infrastructure, built and maintained with this funding, has long provided resources that also support interventions for HBV and HCV, including harm reduction, screening, prophylaxis, treatment, clinic space, and staffing. Against this backdrop, reductions in global health funding risk destabilising these interconnected systems, with consequences for HBV and HCV elimination efforts worldwide.

To explore the early real-world consequences of funding reductions on hepatitis elimination efforts, the Coalition for Global Hepatitis Elimination (CGHE), the World Hepatitis Alliance (WHA), and the Hepatitis Elimination Lab (Plan-B) team issued online surveys to researchers, health-care workers, public health practitioners, civil societies, community-based organisations, people living with HBV or HCV, and government and ministry of health representatives, including national hepatitis programme managers (appendix pp 2–30).8 Surveys were shared from March to October, 2025, through social media, emails, and conference presentations. Responses could be submitted anonymously.

These surveys gathered quantitative and qualitative input from 240 individuals and groups working internationally in hepatitis awareness, patient support, vaccination, testing, care, treatment, and research, allowing them to describe how changes in the global funding landscape have impacted their lives and work. In the Plan-B survey, 31% of respondents reported high impact and 37% possible impact of the funding cuts on clinical care, and 40% of respondents reported high impact and 40% possible impact on research. In responses to the CGHE survey, 40% of organisations and 62% of programme managers reported being affected, and half of respondents to the WHA survey indicated that hepatitis services in their country had already been impacted.

The reasons for these disruptions were broadly consistent: participants cited the collapse of the HIV service framework that previously supported viral hepatitis programmes, the direct loss of research funding, and remaining funds being redirected to other health priorities. Respondents highlighted severe staffing losses—among both clinical teams and ministry of health and public health personnel—which led to clinic closures and, alongside the withdrawal of US National Institutes of Health-funded grants, the cancellation of ongoing research studies.

TO CONTINUE: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langas/article/PIIS2468-1253(26)00014-2/fulltext​

​

February 3, 2026 by Amy Lieberman-The Network For Public Health Law

Historically, there has been no way for people to know what, exactly, is in drugs bought outside of pharmacies. This lack of knowledge leads to increased risk of overdose and other negative outcomes. Contaminants including fentanyl are now present in the illicit drug supply throughout the United States, driving a more than 750 percent increase from 2015 to 2023 in non-methadone synthetic opioid-related overdose deaths. Other adulterants such as xylazine and medetomidine have also appeared in many areas of the country. Helping people determine what is in the drugs they intend to consume, often called “drug checking,” can be an impactful harm reduction intervention.
Drug checking research has shown that people often change their drug use when provided with information about what is in their drugs. Test strips, reagent tests, and more advanced equipment like FTIR machines or mass spectrometers are all used in comprehensive drug checking programs. While these methods vary in both comprehensiveness and expense, all provide information to a person about what is in the drugs they are considering using. 
State drug paraphernalia laws can limit access to drug checking initiatives by prohibiting possessing or distributing anything used for “testing” or “analyzing” drugs. Over the last few years, many states have modified these laws to remove barriers to some or all drug checking equipment. However, these laws typically only permit possession of the equipment used to perform drug checking, and do not explicitly provide protection from arrest and prosecution for possession of the drugs to be tested. Without these protections, the impact of drug checking on communities will not reach its full potential. As of January 2026, only three states--California, Vermont, and Massachusetts—have passed laws that permit both providers and clients to possess drugs to be checked, while Washington and Oregon provide protections for providers only.
California’s law is currently the most comprehensive of these laws. It permits the possession of injection or smoking equipment when obtaining drug checking services and provides a broad set of protections for staff of the drug checking program. Participants engaged in obtaining drug checking services are also immune from detention, arrest, prosecution, violation of parole, probation, or any form of community supervision, civil, disciplinary, or administrative action, forfeiture of property, or referral to ICE for possession of drugs. Further, the law forbids the collection of a participant’s personal information except when a provider is using the information to share results, after which it must be destroyed immediately and may not be shared with law enforcement.

​TO CONTINUE: //www.networkforphl.org/news-insights/state-laws-in-support-of-drug-checking-programs-can-help-reduce-overdose/?emci=48b19610-


Drug checking services have been shown to reduce the risk of overdose by providing people with information on what is in drugs bought outside of pharmacies. Many state drug paraphernalia laws have been changed to increase access to drug checking equipment but are still silent on the use of that equipment. Changing state law to explicitly authorize comprehensive drug checking services could allow this important public health intervention to make a greater impact in reducing overdose death and drug-related harm.
Drug checking



















Drug checking services have been shown to reduce the risk of overdose by providing people with information on what is in drugs bought outside of pharmacies. Many state drug paraphernalia laws have been changed to increase access to drug checking equipment but are still silent on the use of that equipment. Changing state law to explicitly authorize comprehensive drug checking services could allow this important public health intervention to make a greater impact in reducing overdose death and drug-related harm.
ces have been shown to reduce the risk of overdose by providing people with information on what is in drugs bought outside of pharmacies. Many state drug paraphernalia laws have been changed to increase access to drug checking equipment but are still silent on the use of that equipment. Changing state law to explicitly authorize comprehensive drug checking services could allow this important public health intervention to make a greater impact in reducing overdose death and drug-related harm.

Harm reduction experts applaud shift as safer, even as some officials reject pipe use
By Lev Facher, Feb. 12, 2026, STAT -Addiction ReporterROCHESTER, N.H. — Megan Merrill paused, mid-hike, as she surveyed the steep drop before her. She was standing on a five-foot snow drift, icy and brittle after 10 days of unrelenting New England cold, below which lay the railroad tracks that serve as a de facto border between the town behind her and the homeless encampment in front. 
She took the downward slope at a gallop, using her oversized backpack as a counterweight. The bag was made heavy with a stockpile of harm reduction supplies meant to help vulnerable drug users stay healthy and avoid disease, including sterile syringes, condoms, emergency blankets, and hand warmers.
The items Merrill was most eager to distribute, however, were glass pipes. Her reasoning was simple: Injection can lead to infections, diseases, skin abscesses, and potentially higher rates of fatal overdose. To Merrill and harm reduction workers like her, pipes are health care. 
“You’re going to see less vein damage, you’re not going to get abscesses on your arm or infections,” said Merrill, who works with a local community organization, SOS Recovery. “There’s less chance of you overdosing if you’re smoking than if you’re injecting. And infectious diseases: With injections, there are blood-borne illnesses, hepatitis C, HIV.” 
In the last decade, U.S. drug consumption behavior has shifted rapidly away from injecting and toward smoking. Once largely limited to the West Coast, a preference for smoking opioids has spread east since the Covid-19 pandemic, becoming especially pronounced in hard-hit cities like Philadelphia. 
TO CONTINUE READING:  ​https://www.statnews.com/2026/02/12/fentanyl-harm-reduction-smoking-not-injecting/?utm_campaign=rss