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England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c75gk620r22o
125•stevekemp•1h ago

Comments

jmclnx•1h ago
Good news for England.

Thanks to RFKjr and friends, we know what country will be one of the last to do so. Or even worse, the US could end up being a reservoir for HepC.

stevenwoo•58m ago
My reading of the article was aggressive response by single payer healthcare (i.e. NHS) is responsible so that would be almost impossible politically in USA as long as senate exists on top of non scientific medical authorities.
renegade-otter•56m ago
The Senate? He just issued an executive order overriding all science. It's a total farce at this point.
stevenwoo•48m ago
That's true, I was recollecting when we had somewhat ordinary politics in USA and Affordable Care Act passed when Democrats had majority in Senate but making it single payer was stopped by purported Democrat Joe Leiberman.
Denatonium•53m ago
Honestly, Mehmet Oz deserves more of the blame here. He and the other people who are fighting to make healthcare expensive and inaccessible create situations where people aren't being diagnosed and cured of Hep C, which leaves them passing the infection to others through sexual contact, sharing needles, etc.

RFK Jr. is an anti-vax crackpot, but Hep C isn't vaccine-preventable. On the other hand, we can absolutely blame RFK Jr. for our rising Hep A, B, and D rates.

moralestapia•46m ago
Care to elaborate?

What has RFK Jr specifically said for/against HepC?

alistairSH•1h ago
Interesting that it's just England (and not Scotland, Wales, or NI). I realize they all have independent NHSs, but still would assume a program like this would rolled out across all the constituent countries.
beejiu•54m ago
Each country also has their own Public Health bodies, so pretty much everything related to health is devolved
alibarber•52m ago
I wouldn't have assumed this really because really the whole point of devolution is that they get to choose what to prioritise, so perhaps the other nations choose to do something they consider to be more pressing for their populations.
actionfromafar•41m ago
Yeah... but there aren't any borders really.
FartyMcFarter•35m ago
I don't know if borders matter much in this case. It's approximately just as easy to travel to England from many other countries as it is to travel to England from the rest of the UK.
alibarber•28m ago
Given that Great Britain is an island, it is still much easier to drive down the M6/A74(M) or take a hike around the Welsh borders than say, take a flight or swim.
iLoveOncall•57m ago
Literally nothing in the article points to it being eliminated, only reaching a target of diagnosing 90% of the cases, which doesn't do anything to eliminate it when a large number of cases comes from drug users which are unlikely to care very much about it.
vlovich123•54m ago
> The target of treating 80% of all known cases has already been met, and deaths from the virus have fallen by 36% in the last decade, just short of what is needed by 2030. Taking antiviral tablets for 8 to 12 weeks can cure more than 95% of cases.

So indeed diagnosing the cases is leading directly to deaths prevented.

shevy-java•34m ago
> So indeed diagnosing the cases is leading directly to deaths prevented.

This is not what the title claims. The title claims that hepatitis C is to be eliminated, aka 0%. This is not possible; anyone with a basic 101 virology knows why. BBC lies here via the title.

noelwelsh•14m ago
You seem to think there is some kind of conspiracy at play. The BBC is simply using the terminology used by the professionals who deal with this.
Citizen_Lame•48m ago
It's just legalise phrasing, still a good news. Saldy we lost measles eradication status, and tuberculosis might be lost as well soon.
lbriner
renegade-otter•57m ago
Good for you. We get explosive diarrhea as the prize in the States. Wanna trade?
noir_lord•51m ago
Nah we are good - We have our problems (including our own version of your guy but he hasn't won yet and is currently running against a man with a bin on his head) but on the whole, nah we are good.
sizzzzlerz•2m ago
Well, then, we can offer you measles, instead. How's that? We're also working on bringing back polio and smallpox. Think of it as our contribution to FREEDOM!
kandros•56m ago
My brain kept reading Erlang and I was pretty confusing
wowczarek•50m ago
This is actually a good idea for a HN dataset toy: replace all plausibly confusable words in HN headlines with the names of programming languages.
nailer•33m ago
To be fair Erlang is written in Erlang and before that Prolog, so the Erlang community may indeed view C as Hepatitis.
zelphirkalt•56m ago
Just to understand this: When someone says "country England", do they mean "country" like in "nation", considering England a separate nation, or is it a lapse and they mean UK? Is England usually referred to as a country, or just part of a country?

I usually think of a country as equal to a nation, and as far as I know, Wales and Scotland have not split off yet? Is the term "country" not actually that sharply defined?

EDIT: Thanks people, I just asked a question to better understand the terminology, you know ...

llm_nerd•54m ago
England is a country, and if you're reading this on the BBC they most certainly are using the correct terminology.

It is not a sovereign country, but instead is a part of the constituents comprising the UK state.

zelphirkalt•5m ago
OK, so now we have the following terms: State, nation, country, sovereign country.

For example in Germany one would say there are 16 states, but one wouldn't say that there are 16 countries. Never heard anyone claim that. So state seems to be different from country, at least here. Would people in the UK say that Scotland or Wales are "nations"? Or is at least that term very clearly only for units that could participate under a flag in lets say the olympics? (I assume here, that Scotland and Wales are not separately competing, but are under UK flag.)

sd9•53m ago
England is a country. The UK is a country.

People in the UK would refer to England as a country and most people would actually be confused if you referred to the UK as a country, even though it technically is. People in England don’t really think of the UK as anything other than “the UK”. People from Scotland, Wales, and Ireland have more nuanced takes.

Cockbrand•41m ago
So will it be replaced by Hepatitis Rust for memory safety? (I'm sorry, and I'll see myself out, thanks)
ericcholis•39m ago
Take your upvote...not happy about it....but here
peri-cl•18m ago
Share unsafe needles, fearlessly! And concurrently!
shevy-java•35m ago
The title shows a lack of understanding. BBC has become really low quality.
Aflynn50•16m ago
What do you mean by this? The article quotes an NHS director backing up the statement in the title.

> England is now leading the world in the mission to eliminate this disease and on course to beat the WHO's 2030 target, but we are determined to keep up the momentum and finish the job.

Seems fairly unambiguous to me

ck2•32m ago
How can there not be a single sentence in that article HOW IS IT TREATED

If it requires a vaccine you can be sure HEP C will be kept alive and well via MAHA in the US

okay here is a much better article

* https://www.england.nhs.uk/2026/08/100000-people-receive-tre...

> "Treatment involves a free course of antiviral tablets lasting 8 to 12 weeks, which cures more than 95% of cases."

must be nice to have a government that actually cares about its citizens health, we're still waiting DECADES for that Republican health care plan (other than "just die quietly")

alanning•5m ago
Not sure if they edited the article after you read it but this is the 3rd paragraph now:

“Taking antiviral tablets for 8 to 12 weeks can cure more than 95% of cases.”

feverzsj•30m ago
Doubt. They have a huge immigrant population from the highest-prevalence countries.
thex10•26m ago
I am glad they’re screening for it. I was born to someone who had the virus, but didn’t know I had Hep C myself until I submitted myself to an exceptionally thorough STI testing panel. I say exceptional, because the standard ones I’d done throughout college and early adulthood do not happen to include that particular test. So I feel a bit lucky to have been able to get diagnosed and treated in my mid-20s, before the disease could do much damage.
nly•4m ago
That's odd. I just looked at what I thought was a pretty standard piss and blood STI test results of my own, and it covered:

- Syphilis

- Hep B

- Hep C

- HIV 1 and 2 and P24

- Chlamydia

- Gonorrhoea

claudex•17m ago
Now everyone is migrating to hepatitis Rust
eptcyka•23m ago
It is a lot harder to travel into England from outside of the United Kingdom than it is to travel from England to Scotland or Wales. For one, I do not need a passport to get on a train to Scotland. Nor do I need a visa.
satvikpendem•12m ago
What? No it's not just as easy, especially since Brexit now there are real border issues compared to driving down the road.
alibarber•33m ago
Indeed but there are still different decision makers and sets of voters electing them.
amiga386•38m ago
Each nation has different social and health issues, each nation makes its own plan.

All four nations NHSes work with a single charity, the Hep C Trust.

They're all following the WHO targets for elimination -- you're hearing about this now soon after World Hepatitis Day (July 28th, as conceived of by the WHO).

https://www.hepctrust.org.uk/blog/2026/07/four-nations-on-th...

As for progress:

- July 2026: Wales doesn't have percentage-of-population counts but here's its latest report: https://phw.nhs.wales/reports/trends-in-the-prevention-diagn...

- November 2025: Scotland believes it has identified and is treating 85% of chronic sufferers: https://publichealthscotland.scot/publications/surveillance-...

- January 2021: Northern Ireland doesn't publish stats, but has a 2021-2025 plan (there's no 2026- plan issued as far as I know) https://www.health-ni.gov.uk/publications/northern-ireland-h...

•
48m ago
Elimination doesn't mean there are no incidences of it, it means no new cases diagnosed in England. This is a result of reducing the cases so much that the chance of catching it drops to virtually zero. Drug users have a range of cleaner alternatives today than 10 years ago so is less of an issue but also if very few people have it, the chance of a drug user sharing a needle with someone who has becomes very small indeed.
shevy-java•33m ago
Elimination means 0%. If BBC wants to convey something else, they should use other statements. The title insinuates this.

> Drug users have a range of

The title does not even mention drug users.

The title refers to the hepatitis C virus. That virus existed way before drug users did.

juntoalaluna•52m ago
No one is confused if you can the UK a country, or if you call England, Wales, or Scotland a country.

You might get a tedious person saying something like "actually, Wales is a principality".

sd9•47m ago
Maybe not in isolation, but if you call the UK and England both countries in the same conversation you’re going to be met with confusion.
Closi•16m ago
Maybe...? I mean not anyone I know but i'm in the UK to be fair.

It's like if you put four boxes in a box, it's not too confusing that the outer box is still a box.

leereeves•47m ago
I would be confused if someone called Wales a country. I thought Wales (unlike Scotland) was a region of England and had little autonomy. TIL.
beejiu•53m ago
A lot of powers are devolved away from England to each other country in the UK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devolution_in_the_United_Kingd...
psp99•52m ago
Wales and Scotland are separate countries to England.
alibarber•48m ago
In this case it's health related and each of the countries in the UK have their own National Health Services (or Health and Social Care in NI). It's not a lapse here.
shevy-java•32m ago
I kind of assumed that they actually meant UK. It's indeed confusing. I'd wish the BBC would use a consistent naming scheme.

Guess only England was meant. That would insinuate they don't care about scotland though.

alibarber•24m ago
I don't understand. It's an article about England. They only have information to hand about England, from the authority tasked with dealing with health in England.

If I read an article from them about crime in London, quoting the Metropolitan Police, I don't immediately think that they don't care about, say, the West Midlands.

gilleain•47m ago
Some of the confusion here is from our history. This is my (likely confused) understanding:

James VI/I (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_VI_and_I) was king of _both_ England and Scotland and only later did the Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Union combine the two. You might notice I've neglected Wales which was (considered?) part of England.

In any case, England is a country, yes. Also the UK is a country.

_heimdall•46m ago
England is the country, part of the United Kingdom. Kingdom being the key word there, the US is a collection of countries ruled by the crown.
toast0•31m ago
The commonwealth is also a collection of countries ruled by the crown; but it's not a country whereas the UK is a country.
JimDabell•40m ago
England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland are constituent countries in a larger country called the United Kingdom. When dealing with international affairs, you typically want to be talking about the UK (unless the subject is sport), as that is the sovereign state. But for domestic affairs, it’s often split in ways that are confusing if you don’t understand various bits of history stretching back about a thousand years.

For instance, England and Wales share a legal system, but Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own. There’s bunch of special things about Northern Ireland and its relation to Ireland. And all of the constituent countries have their own parliament / assembly except for England (the parliament in London is for the whole of the UK where MPs for all constituent countries can vote).

In this particular case, the constituent countries have their own health systems, so it’s normally England we would be talking about, not the UK.

keybored•40m ago
Yeah England is a country. Like what else do we have the name “England” for? We talk a lot more about England than some non-country geography like Anatolia (Asian Turkey). For example there was no UK in the World Cup, but England made it quite far.

If that’s a bit eccentric, well this is the same place that refers to Europe as a different place even though France borders the UK by automobile road.

sscaryterry•14m ago
To make things worse, sometimes team GB competes :) (Edit: in other sports)
amiga386•10m ago
CGP Grey: The United Kingdom Explained (2015) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNu8XDBSn10

England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c75gk620r22o
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