WASHINGTON — There’s new hope for an overlooked epidemic: Two powerful drugs are nearing the market that promise to help cure many more people of liver-attacking hepatitis C — even though most who have the simmering infection don’t know it yet.
Surprisingly, two-thirds of hepatitis-C sufferers are thought to be baby boomers who’ve harbored since their younger, perhaps wilder, years a virus that can take two or three decades to do its damage.
What could be a treatment revolution is spurring the government to consider if it’s time to start screening aging baby boomers for hepatitis C, just like they get various cancer checks.
Today’s two-drug treatment for hepatitis C cures only about 40 percent of people with the most common variety of the virus and causes some grueling side effects. Now, major studies show that adding a new drug — either Vertex Pharmaceuticals’ telaprevir or Merck & Co.’s boceprevir — can boost those cure rates as high as 75 percent. And they allow some people to cut treatment time in half, to six months, thus lessening how long they must deal with those side effects, including flulike symptoms, rash and anemia.
If the Food and Drug Administration approves the drugs — a decision widely expected this summer — they would be the first that work by directly targeting the hepatitis-C virus.
However, the bigger impact could come if more people get tested for hepatitis C, a blood- borne virus. It’s often stigmatized as a risk only to people who inject illegal drugs. But the virus could have begun festering from a blood transfusion before 1992, when testing of the blood supply began.
