Health: Hepatitis C

Lord Patel Excerpts

Thursday 28th April 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Prior of Brampton]

My Lords, I do not think I can answer that question as I do not fully understand it. Perhaps I could meet the noble Baroness outside the Chamber. All I can say is that NHS England is funding the new interferon-free treatments in accordance with the NICE technology appraisals, and is prioritising people on the basis of unmet need. I think the modelling assumption shows that 10,000 people will receive the new treatment in the coming year. I cannot answer the specifics of the noble Baroness’s question but I will follow it up outside, if I can.

[Lord Patel (CB)]

My Lords, an estimated 220,000 individuals in the United Kingdom are chronically infected with hepatitis C virus. Deaths among the under-60s from end-stage liver disease and liver cancers due to the virus have doubled over the last decade. We have in the interferon-free treatment a drug that is effective in successfully treating the disease, as it reduces the viral load in 98% of patients treated to virtually zero in the whole spectrum of genome of hepatitis C virus. Therefore, it is an effective preventive drug for developing end-stage disease. It has the potential to eradicate the disease in the population. In that scenario, why would we treat only 10,000 patients per year, as the guidance says, for the next two years and not treat every patient who is a chronic carrier of hepatitis C virus?

[Lord Prior of Brampton]

My Lords, there is clearly a budgetary constraint. The noble Lord mentioned 220,000 people—I thought it was slightly less than that—and this drug costs many tens of thousands of pounds per treatment. Clearly, however much we would like to treat 220,000 people, it is just not feasible to do so. That is why we have NICE, which has produced its appraisals and said that, using its modelling, the number of people who need to be treated in the coming year is likely to be between 7,000 and 10,000, rising to 15,000 by 2021. However, I agree with the noble Lord that this interferon-free treatment is a massive improvement on previous treatments, with a very high cure rate.