The loss leaves the country with no good way to measure the scale of the viral disease, 
By Helen Branswell April 14, 2025  Senior Writer, Infectious Diseases
An estimated 4 million Americans are infected with hepatitis C, a disease that can go undetected for years. Another 2.4 million people in this country are chronically infected with hepatitis B, which is the leading cause of liver cancer globally. Hepatitis B is preventable, and hepatitis C is curable. But the U.S. capacity to battle these viral scourges has been leveled a devastating blow with the April 1 closure of the country’s premier testing laboratory for viral hepatitis, experts warned. The lab was one of the targets of this month’s Department of Health and Human Services reductions in force, or RIFs, which slashed about 18% of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s workforce and abruptly terminated many of the public health programs conducted by the Atlanta-based agency.The loss of the CDC’s viral hepatitis lab will leave the country with no good way to measure the scale of the problem it faces with these diseases, they suggested, and less able to find the sources of — and put an end to — outbreaks that can be linked to contaminated food, in the case of hepatitis A, or poor infection control procedures in medical facilities, in the case of hepatitis B and C. 
TO CONTINUE READING :https://www.statnews.com/2025/04/14/cdc-hepatitis-lab-closes-rif-outbreak-response/

​Published February 26, 2025 | Originally published on CDC Releases and Announcements

New provisional data from CDC's National Vital Statistics System predict a nearly 24% decline in drug overdose deaths in the United States for the 12 months ending in September 2024, compared to the previous year. This is the most recent national data available and shows a continued steep decline in overdose deaths. Provisional data shows about 87,000 drug overdose deaths from October 2023 to September 2024, down from around 114,000 the previous year. This is the fewest overdose deaths in any 12-month period since June 2020.
"It is unprecedented to see predicted overdose deaths drop by more than 27,000 over a single year," said Allison Arwady, MD, MPH, Director of CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. "That's more than 70 lives saved every day. CDC's public health investments, our improved data and laboratory systems for overdose response, and our partnerships with public safety colleagues in every state mean that we are more rapidly identifying emerging drug threats and supporting public health prevention and response activities in communities across America."
A common chronic liver condition: when to suspect metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH) Novo Nordisk

While this national decline is encouraging news, overdose remains the leading cause of death for Americans aged 18-44, highlighting the importance of sustained efforts to ensure this progress continues. President Trump first declared opioid overdose to be a public health emergency in 2017, a designation that remains in place, and the subsequent public health investments to CDC from Congress have transformed the nation's ability to use data to save lives. In the most recent data, 45 states showed declines in overdose deaths, but five states—Alaska, Montana, Nevada, South Dakota, and Utah—still saw increases in overdose deaths, highlighting the continued need for rapid local data and tailored response. In addition to the large provisional drop in fatal overdoses, we also see smaller decreases in nonfatal overdoses, as measured by emergency department visits for overdose, and welcome continued decreases in self-reported youth substance use.

Multiple factors contribute to the drop in overdose deaths, including widespread, data-driven distribution of naloxone, which is a life-saving medication that can reverse an overdose; better access to evidence-based treatment for substance use disorders; shifts in the illegal drug supply; a resumption of prevention and response after pandemic-related disruptions; and continued investments in prevention and response programs like CDC's flagship Overdose Data to Action (OD2A) program.

TO CONTINUE READING:​  https://www.mdlinx.com/news/cdc-reports-nearly-24-decline-in-us-drug-overdose-deaths/1JeXjAkEoZQlRazX8uObI3?show_order=4&utm_campaign=reg_

ORIGINAL RESEARCH articleFront. Public Health, 22 January 2025
Sec. Children and Health
Volume 12 - 2024 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2024.1504678
Farihah Malik1*†Philippa Easterbrook2Giuseppe Indolfi3,4Claire Thorne1

• 1UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health, University College London, London, United Kingdom
• 2Department of Global HIV, Hepatitis and STI Programmes, World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland
• 3Meyer Children’s Hospital IRCCS, Florence, Italy
• 4Department Neurofarba, University of Florence, Florence, Italy

Background and aims: There are gaps in knowledge about the values and preferences of healthcare workers (HCW) with respect to treatment of children and adolescents living with chronic hepatitis C (HCV) infection. This study was carried out to identify these values and preferences as part of the evidence required to update World Health Organization (WHO) hepatitis C guidelines.
Methods: An online survey was designed and conducted during August/September 2021. Survey questions were developed to address two key questions about treatment of children and adolescents: who to treat, and which direct acting antiviral (DAA) regimens to use. The survey was circulated by the WHO to nine networks providing care to children and adolescents living with HCV infection, with respondents requested to cascade further within their networks.
Results: A total of 137 individuals from 38 countries responded to the survey. There was a trend toward higher preference for treating children of older age groups; 60% of respondents reported a strong preference for treating (i.e., stating they were very likely or likely to treat) children aged 3 to <6 years, 81 and 95% indicated strong preferences for treating those aged 6 to <12 years and 12 to <18 years, respectively. The most preferred DAA regimens for treatment across all age groups were: sofosbuvir/velpatasvir (SOF/VEL), sofosbuvir/ledipasvir (SOF/LDV), and glecaprevir/pibrentasvir (GLE/PIB). These were also reported to be the most commonly available drug regimens at respondents’ facilities.
Conclusion: This survey provides insights from a heterogenous sample of HCWs from across the world with respect to their expressed priorities and preferences for the treatment of children and adolescents with chronic HCV.

TO CONTINUE READING:
​https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2024.1504678/full?utm_source=F-NTF&utm_medium=EMLX&utm_campaign=PRD_FEOPS_20170000_ARTICLE

​By Elizabeth Pratt | Fact-checked by Barbara Bekiesz | Published December 19, 2024
MDLinx

Industry Buzz

• “It is said that medicine is a combination of art and science. [It’s] based on science, but the application of the science for the benefit of the patient, well, that's an art.” — William Schaffner, MD
  
• “They don’t want to interrupt your sleep or private time—they would much rather be in bed themselves. [Remember], it’s neither the emergency doctor’s nor the patient’s fault that some specialist’s expertise is critically needed at an uncivil hour.” — Michael Curry, MD
  

Find more of your peers' perspectives and insights below.
The new year is almost upon us, and there’s never been a better time to brush up on bedside manner.
Sir William Osler, one of the founding professors of Johns Hopkins Hospital, once stated, “The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.”[1]


Bedside manner is crucial to patient care, and there is always room for improvement. If you want to improve your bedside manner in 2025, here are eight helpful hints.

​TO LEARN MORE:https://www.mdlinx.com/article/want-to-be-a-better-doctor-in-2025-adopt-these-8-habits-for-better-bedside-manner/5G402HZgL10Zpn6FZEPGaW?sh

Summary: In a message to the substance use treatment and public health communities, CDC and SAMHSA leaders highlight the need for and opportunities to increase the provision of HIV and viral hepatitis testing as a part of substance use disorder treatment services.
In a new joint letter, the leaders of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) encourage the public health and substance use disorder (SUD) treatment communities to increase the number of people with SUD who are tested and treated for HIV and viral hepatitis.

In their message, “Advancing HIV and Viral Hepatitis Testing with Point-of-Care Diagnostics for People with Substance Use Disorder,” Miriam Delphin-Rittmon, PhD, Assistant Secretary for Mental Health and Substance Use, and Mandy Cohen, MD, MPH, Director, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, discuss the connection between injection drug use and acquisition of hepatitis C, hepatitis B, and HIV, the prevalence of these diseases among people who inject drugs, and CDC’s recommendations for HIV, HCV, and HBV testing for people who inject drugs. While millions of Americans receive SUD treatment services each year, they observe, only a third of the nation’s 15,000 SUD treatment facilities offer HIV, HCV, or HBV testing. They encourage those facilities to integrate HIV and viral hepatitis testing into the services they offer clients and highlight recent advances in point-of-care diagnostics that support such integration, including FDA-approved POC tests for HIV and the recently FDA-cleared fingerstick POC HCV RNA test that enables same-day diagnosis.

​Providing these tests in SUD treatment settings can reduce barriers to accessing them and facilitate initiation of treatment.

https://www.hiv.gov/blog/cdc-and-samhsa-leaders-encourage-hiv-and-viral-hepatitis-testing-in-substance-use-disorder-treatment

Related HIV.gov Blogs

12 December 2024
By Sorcha Daly, Rebecca Bulmer, Vincent Condron, Gary Hind and Matthew Smith

Hepatitis C (HCV) is a blood-borne virus that is most commonly acquired by people who inject drugs. If left untreated, HCV can cause cirrhosis of the liver, liver failure and liver cancer. Unfortunately, due to its most common transmission routes (the sharing of unsterile injecting equipment), hepatitis C is also a stigmatised disease. As such, people who use drugs with a HCV diagnosis face multi-layered stigma, often seen as instruments of contagion, rather than those deserving of care.
It is unsurprising, then, that receiving a positive diagnosis of hepatitis C can have a negative effect on mental health. Diagnosis is associated with lower self-esteem, social isolation, and fears around disclosure and confidentiality breaches. There are also much higher levels of existing mental health difficulties in people diagnosed with HCV. As Dame Carol Black notes in her independent review of drugs in the UK, “trauma (physical, sexual or psychological) and mental ill-health are the drivers and accompaniment” of drug dependency.   
Despite the obvious need for mental and other health services for people with a HCV diagnosis, stigma related to HCV and its transmission routes affect how people interact with health services and can stop people from seeking health care. This not only excludes people from the testing and treatment that could quickly and simply cure HCV, but from accessing mental health and recovery services needed to support the cessation of practices that elevate the risk of acquiring HCV and other blood-borne viruses.

At the Hepatitis C Trust, a group of Peer Researchers have been discussing the use of stigmatising language in policy and research documents and service delivery. We reviewed words and phrases (too many to fit into this blog) used in service delivery, policy and academic papers. Phrases such as ‘drug of choice’ (‘it was never a choice, just a necessity’) and ‘substance use disorder’ (I didn’t use because I was disordered, I just couldn’t deal with the trauma’) were highlighted. As the quotes from our meeting demonstrate, language often misrepresents the reality, perspectives and experiences of people who take and/or are dependent on drugs, leading to policy and practice that fails to meet their needs.

TO CONTINUE READING:​https://www.centreformentalhealth.org.uk/hepatitis-c-and-mental-health-using-peer-support-to-fight-stigma/

​The United States is still in the throes of this devastating emergency. So why has all discussion of it faded from the campaign?

Years after it was declared a public health emergency, the overdose crisis continues to impact the nation in profoundly tragic ways. In 2023, more than 107,000 people in the United States died of a drug-related overdose. For people aged 18–45, the leading cause of death may be fentanyl-related drug overdose; each week, dozens of teens die of an overdose across the country. Overdose death rates have increased for Black, Hispanic, Asian, and Native Americans. Families from rural West Virginia to the streets of the Bronx have something sorrowful in common: They all find themselves grieving a loved one.

But if you’ve been paying attention to this year’s presidential campaign, you wouldn’t really think it’s that big an issue. The Republican Party platform has no section about tackling the overdose crisis, while the Democratic Party offers three small paragraphs that address the Biden administration’s work in expanding treatment—and increasing the use of naloxone—while promising this work will continue under a Harris administration.

And while you may not hear about overdose deaths themselves, both parties have extensively referenced the drug that is causing them—fentanyl. The Republican Party platform makes mention of the drug, and the Democrats reference it 16 times in their own platform. But instead of tying the synthetic opioid to the ongoing public health crisis, politicians have cynically entangled “fentanyl” in an entirely different issue: It’s being used to hype up the ongoing political culture war involving border security and immigration.
In multiple ads touting her border security chops, Kamala Harris promises that as president she will crack down on fentanyl, including by investing in fentanyl detection technology to block it from entering the country. The Republicans, meanwhile, directly implicate migrants, with Donald Trump frequently saying that migrants are responsible for an increase in fentanyl overdoses. All of this has damaging impacts on what people believe about asylum-seekers—a 2022 poll, for instance, found that many Americans, especially Republicans, believe that migrants are smuggling fentanyl across the U.S. border. This, of course, is a flat-out lie: Most fentanyl enters the country through ports of entry and is carried by U.S. citizens.
Predominately talking about overdoses as a border security issue not only falsely ties people seeking asylum to overdose deaths but also overshadows real solutions to this crisis, while inhibiting their potential effectiveness. Fentanyl is a dangerous drug, but it is talked about as if it was a “weapon of mass destruction” and treated like a threat to national security—like anthrax, rather than something that contributes to overdoses and substance use disorders. What this misses is how fentanyl impacts the drug supply and who uses drugs in the United States.

On the one hand, fentanyl is found in pressed pills and can sometimes be mixed into drugs like cocaine (usually inadvertently). For people who have no prior exposure to fentanyl, say a teenager buying pills, such a dose can be deadly. There are also people who regularly use fentanyl (heroin is almost impossible to get in the U.S. nowadays) and are used to the dosages. If they don’t use fentanyl, they can go into withdrawal. At the same time, the drug supply is constantly changing, and new, more potent drugs can emerge—putting regular users at risk of overdosing. This is a complex and multifaceted problem, and it affects different people in a range of ways.

TO CONTINUE READING:
https://newrepublic.com/article/185098/overdose-crisis-2024-harris-trump

By  CARLA K. JOHNSON
Updated 9:17 AM EDT, September 20, 2024 AP NEWS

The first big update to U.S. methadone regulations in 20 years is poised to expand access to the life-saving drug starting next month, but experts say the addiction treatment changes could fall flat if state governments and methadone clinics fail to act.
For decades, strict rules required most methadone patients to line up at special clinics every morning to sip their daily dose of the liquid medicine while being watched. The rules, built on distrust of people in the grip of opioid addiction, were meant to prevent overdoses and diversion — the illicit selling or sharing of methadone.
The COVID-19 pandemic changed the risk calculation. To prevent the spread of the coronavirus at crowded clinics, emergency rules allowed patients to take methadone unsupervised at home.
Research showed the looser practice was safe. Overdose deaths and drug diversion didn’t increase. And people stayed in treatment longer.
With evidence mounting, the U.S. government made the changes permanent early this year. Oct. 2 is the date when clinics must comply with the new rules — unless they’re in a state with more restrictive regulations.

TOCONTINUE: https://apnews.com/article/methadone-opioids-addiction-treatment-6dc1634de4cdac06410149e6a1372e18#

​Published August 27, 2024 | Originally published on Pennsylvania State University Health and Medicine News

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 108,000 people died from drug overdoses in 2022, 76% of which involved an opioid. However, there is limited research that examines the risk factors for overdose particularly among women who may face different challenges compared to men.
“Women who use drugs are heavily stigmatized because many are also mothers. This stigma may prohibit women from seeking harm reduction programs and substance use treatment,” said Abenaa Jones, the Ann Atherton Hertzler Early Career Professor in Health and Human Development, assistant professor of human development and family studies and senior author of the paper.

CME Activity: Optimizing Care for Prurigo Nodularis - Evidence-Based Treatment Approaches and Personalized Strategies RealCME
Women who use drugs and are involved in the criminal legal system are in a particularly vulnerable state, the researchers said. Not only do they face a high chance of overdose immediately following release but involvement in the criminal legal system also imposes longer-term challenges to recovery.
“These stigmas and barriers can make it hard to attain the forms of ‘recovery capital’ that are so needed to sustain recovery,” said Kristina Brant, assistant professor of rural sociology and co-author of the study. “Finding unique ways to support this group facing so many intersecting vulnerabilities is essential to promoting well-being.”

TO CONTINUE: https://www.mdlinx.com/news/harm-reduction-education-tools-access-may-help-women-prevent-opioid-overdose/23n71EiP8I3JNQBTlKbeMK?show_order=7&utm_campaign=reg_daily-alert_240828_daily-nl-am-v4_registered-users-a180&utm_source=iterable&utm_medium=email

Findings reveal shortfalls in hepatitis C elimination efforts in the United States and Mexico
UC San Diego Today July 30,2024

An international team of researchers from University of California San Diego and el Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Mexico have revealed a significant association between the use of illicit fentanyl and the transmission of hepatitis C virus (HCV) among people who inject drugs in San Diego, California and Tijuana, Mexico. The findings, published in Clinical Infectious Diseases, suggest that illicit fentanyl use could be driving recent increases in HCV incidence.
"
Our study provides the first evidence that illicit fentanyl use is linked to an increased risk of acquiring hepatitis C infection, which disproportionately affects people who inject drugs," said Steffanie Strathdee, Ph.D., senior author and professor of medicine at UC San Diego School of Medicine. "This underscores the importance of making point-of-care HCV viral load testing more widely available in the U.S., so those needing treatment can access it immediately."

HCV is one of several types of hepatitis, inflammation of the liver most often caused by a viral infection. HCV is most often transmitted through blood, which means that people who inject drugs are at particularly high risk of acquiring the disease.

Once acquired, the virus is easy to transmit unknowingly, because symptoms of HCV often don’t emerge until months or years after the initial infection. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), about half of people with HCV do not know they have it.
HCV prevalence is also on the rise in recent years; according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the number of reported cases of acute hepatitis C has doubled since 2014 and, during 2021, increased by 5 percent from 2020.
The new study, which followed a cohort of 398 people who inject drugs over two years, found that illicit fentanyl use was associated with a 64 percent increased risk of acquiring HCV.
TO CONTINUE READING:​https://today.ucsd.edu/story/illicit-fentanyl-use-linked-to-increased-risk-of-hepatitis-c-among-people-who-use-drugs