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After consulting with experts and leading hospitals, the health and insurance
sector agreed to bring new drugs for hepatitis C treatment into the list of
medicine covered by health insurance fund, said Prof. Nguyen Van Kinh, Director
of the National Hospital of Tropical Diseases.
Kinh said that the new medications help shorten treatment duration because they
are effective and have fewer side effects.
The inclusion of new drugs to treat hepatitis C on the list covered by health
insurance opens more opportunities for Vietnamese patients to access advanced
treatments, he said.
Nguyen Trong Khoa, Deputy Director of the Health Ministry’s Preventive Medicine
Department, said Vietnam ranks 4th in the world in terms of mortality from liver
cancer. The country has about one million people infected with hepatitis C virus
and 10 million infected with hepatitis B, so the community’s need for treatment
services is increasing day by day, he said.
The practice is an important milestone to achieve the goal to eliminate
hepatitis by 2030 and reduce the burden of liver diseases in Vietnam, said Khoa,
adding that hepatitis C and hepatitis B are the main causes of liver diseases in
Vietnam.
Antiviral medicines can cure more than 95 percent of people with hepatitis C,
thereby reducing the risk of death from liver cancer and cirrhosis, but access
to diagnosis and treatment is low, according to Khoa.
Khoa said the Health Ministry also worked with foreign pharmaceutical companies
to franchise drug production and boost production in Vietnam at a cheaper price,
creating favourable conditions for patients to access treatments for liver
diseases.
Hepatitis C is a liver disease caused by hepatitis C virus, according to the
World Health Organisation (WHO).
According to WHO, some 71 million people have chronic hepatitis C infections
globally whereas about 399,000 people die each year from hepatitis C, mostly
from cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma.
Source: VNA
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