RECOGNIZING THE SILENT KILLER HEP C HOTBED

VICTORIA The Victoria region is in the midst of a hepatitis C health
crisis, says front-line community worker Carol Romanow.

And although the potentially deadly virus can be contracted much the same
as AIDS - by direct contact with the blood of an infected person - it is
even more prevalent than AIDS among local injection drug users.

"Hep C tends to be even more readily transmissible," said Murray Fyfe, the
Vancouver Island Health Authority's health officer of communicable
diseases, noting the biggest risk factor is sharing infected needles. "The
prevalence of hep C infection is higher than it is for HIV."

There were 610 new cases of hep C reported on Vancouver Island last year,
he said, and only 72 reports of new HIV infections.

"It's not just Victoria, it's a crisis across Canada," said Eric Ages,
spokesperson for AIDS Vancouver Island.

While hep C is widespread, Victoria has an unusually high hep C prevalence
rate among injection drug users, according to a survey report released
February 2004 by the Public Health Agency of Canada.

Survey participants were sought through needle-exchange programs in four
Canadian cities - Regina, Sudbury, Toronto and Victoria.

Victoria had the highest hep C prevalence among the sampling of injection
drug users at almost 80 per cent, noted the report.

The average hep C prevalence for the four cities was much lower at 64 per cent.

This relatively high prevalence in our West Coast city is less surprising
considering an earlier study of Vancouver injection drug users reported a
prevalence of 82 per cent in that population.

But it's not all bad news.

Looking back at past numbers, Fyfe said, "There's actually a downward trend
in the number of new cases."

Back in 2002, 842 new hep C cases were reported on Vancouver Island,
compared with 758 in 2003 and 610 in 2004.

Despite the decline in new cases, the population of hep C victims in B.C.
is still increasing considerably each year, Fyfe explained. He estimated
those with hep C make up about one or two per cent of the population of
Vancouver Island.

Safe-injection sites throughout the Capital Region would reduce those
numbers, argue Ages and Romanow, who are both strong advocates of harm
reduction.

Romanow, a board member of the Society of Living Intravenous Drug Users who
runs a needle exchange program from her gray van, told city officials of
the hep C crisis at a recent public meeting on harm reduction.

"We have a crisis," she said. "We need to act."

Part of why Romanow is so passionate about stopping the spread of hep C is
because she, herself, was diagnosed with the virus 1999.

"I got tested because I got very sick and no one could figure out what it
was," she said.

Before contracting it she wasn't "aware of the extent" of the virus, which
was only first identified in 1989.

However, she soon learned just how abundant it was in the downtown east
side of Vancouver. She also learned of the stigmas associated with it.

"It's a moralized disease," she said. "It was always attributed to the
transmission of drugs."

She pointed out that people can contract the illness many other ways,
including through tattooing, ear-piercing and pap smears if equipment used
is not properly sterilized.

Although Fyfe said sharing dirty needles is the primary way the virus
spreads, he elaborated that the virus does have a history of infection
among people who don't use injection drugs.

"There was a period of time through the '80s and '90s when transmission
through blood supply was an issue," he said. "Ten per cent of existing
infections occurred this way."

Romanow compared the "moralized" situation to when AIDS first emerged and
was dubbed a disease of gay men.