the social determinants of health extend beyond housing: income, access to education, food security, social inclusion and more. these are all effective public health measures that can’t be left out of our response to hepatitis c and other viral epidemics.
act now, save later
the economic cost of covid-19 is unparallelled. jobs have been lost, trade has been hampered, entire industries have collapsed. the trickle-down effects on tax revenue and public spending are yet to be tabulated. hindsight is always 20/20, but you would be hard-pressed to find an economist who would not see the value in governments having invested in stronger and more effective public health measures before the pandemic began.
we can’t change the past, but we can learn from it. looking forward, some have described hepatitis c as a “ticking viral time bomb” because the number of undiagnosed infections could lead to an unmanageable prevalence of liver disease and costs to the health-care system in the future. hepatitis c in canada currently costs us $160 million per year, and this number is expected to increase to $260 million by 2032 when current cases develop complications.
but if we changed our approaches now — broadening our testing strategies, focusing prevention efforts on priority populations, and ensuring everyone gets access to curative treatments — epidemiologists project that canada could actually eliminate hepatitis c as a public health threat by 2030, saving millions of dollars in averted health-care costs.