10 interesting stats on the treatment of drug dependency across Australia, including uptake of opioid pharmacotherapy.

Supervised drug consumption facilities, have been operating in Europe for the last 30 years. They help to reduce the acute risks of disease transmission, prevent drug-related overdose deaths and connect high-risk people who use drugs with addiction treatment and other health and social services.

Almost one-fifth of patients with opioid use disorder (OUD) in a large healthcare system died during a four-year follow-up period, reports a new study.

A perfect storm of alcohol and drugs is brewing for elders.

This article is based on a presentation given by Esther Croes at the Hepatitis Community Summit 2017 in Amsterdam, on April 19, 2017.

The World Health Organization’s Global Strategy and Regional Action Plans for Hepatitis outline an ambitious scenario for 2030: eliminate viral Hepatitis as a public health threat.

The U.S. government does not track death rates for every drug. However, the National Center for Health Statistics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does collect information on many of the more commonly used drugs.

It is completely unacceptable that in 2017 one can say, without doubt, “drug-related deaths have continued to rise in most areas”. Overdose and AIDS related mortality remain the leading causes of death in people who inject drugs (“PWID”). This is in spite of the fact that HIV in PWIDs is an easily preventable disease and the many interventions that are known to significantly reduce death by overdose.

Written by IDHDP Director, Graham Foster, Professor of Hepatology Queen Mary University of London. All of the modelling completed to-date suggests that treating those who are actively using drugs will dramatically reduce onward transmission of hepatitis C and many experts see treatment in those with on-going drug use as the key to control of the hepatitis C epidemic.

Professor Frank Tacke works at the University Hospital, Aachen and is EASL Vice Secretary General and spoke at the Correlation Hepatitis C community summit in April 2017.

Drug dependence is a recognized medical condition and therefore, right to health applies in the same way to drug dependence as it does to any other health condition.

The burden of HCV-related liver disease among people who inject drugs is increasing, but treatment uptake remains extremely low. There are a number of barriers to care which should be considered and systematically addressed, but should not exclude PWID from HCV treatment.

New figures show that the number of injecting drug users in the city diagnosed with the virus has risen by 600 per cent in the past year.

This report describes, for the first time, the global and regional estimates on viral hepatitis in 2015, setting the baseline for tracking progress in implementing the new global strategy.

Written by Magdalena Harris. She draws on her journey as a person living with hepatitis C and as researcher - and how she has experienced and worked to bridge the researcher-peer divide in her own practice.

For the fourth year running, the number of drug-related deaths in Germany has risen.

Opioid overdose is a major cause of premature mortality not only in eastern Europe but in Scotland, as confirmed by the Global Burden of Disease Study 2015.

How successful treatment for HCV made such a difference. By Stefan Bratovanov and Tonny van Montfoort, CBuddies Project 2017

The language doctors and medical journals use to describe dependence has a real effect on patients. Journals have a responsibility to communicate clearly in ways that benefit patients. IDHDP & 4 other medical organisations call for respectful first-person language.

Written by Prof. Mojca Maticic, MD, PhD. Internal medicine & ID specialist, Head, Dpt for Viral Hepatitis, Clinic for Infectious Diseases and Febrile Illnesses, University Medical Centre Ljubljana, Slovenia

This is a historic moment for hepatitis C treatment. With the advent of direct-acting antivirals (DAAs) we can now massively reduce the harm from an infectious disease that affects millions of people and causes hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths every year.

This strategy sets out an ambitious course of travel for the agency to 2025. It presents a vision to contribute to a healthier and more secure Europe, through better informed drug policy and action.

Much of the coverage of drugs contains misinformation and inaccurate or misleading terminology. This all serves to perpetuate unfounded myths and unhelpful hysteria about these substances.

As 2017 moved forward, Hepatitis Scotland wrote ten key challenges for the year ahead.

Written by Prof Jeffrey V. Lazarus. Associated Researcher, ISGlobal, Hospital Clínic, University of Barcelona, CHIP, Rigshospitalet, University of Copenhagen, WHO Collaborating Centre on HIV and Viral Hepatitis Editor-in-Chief, Hepatology, Medicine and Policy.

Programmes usually address individuals but most equipment sharing occurs between sexual partners.

Women who inject drugs have been shown to have higher incidence of HIV and risk behaviours than men, but there are conflicting reports about hepatitis C virus (HCV) incidence.

All people with chronic HCV infection should start therapy with direct-acting antivirals, research published in the online edition of Clinical Infectious Diseases suggests.

The purpose of this review is to summarize published literature on the efficacy and safety of oral DAAs for treatment of persons with chronic HCV infection.

Patients diagnosed with hepatitis C infection in an ED setting can be treated and cured at similar rates as those diagnosed in ambulatory care settings, despite the challenges these patients may face, according to findings published in 'Clinical Infectious Diseases.'