At the moment about a third of my work is helping people from the USA access affordable medicines. Every day I get around 30 emails from desperate people in the USA asking for assistance or advice. Some are happy to fly to either India, or Australia or Thailand to buy the medicines they need there. Others, for what ever reason, prefer to have their generic Hep C treatment shipped to the USA.
It is a sad irony that in the world’s largest economy hundreds or thousands of US citizens are suffering because they are not able to access an affordable cure for an easily curable disease... Hepatitis C.
It is also ironic that a person from a small island off the southern tip of Australia is helping some of those people to access affordable generic Hep C treatment from either India or Australia.
Anyway life is strange and that is what is happening. The upside of the US situation is that I love getting emails from people in the USA who have started or completed their generic Hep C treatment and are excited to share the good news that follows.
I think that yesterday I got one of the best news stories I ever received from the USA about Hep C treatment.
It was from a guy in the US who purchased Indian generic Harvoni. There were a couple of minor dramas during the delivery process and the FDA got hold of the medicines and wanted to know why he needed them.
Fortunately this guy had a supportive doctor and after week the FDA released the generic Harvoni and it was delivered.
(I should add here that these dramas are VERY rare but when they do occur I am totally available to assist and at this stage we still have a 100% success rate of generic Hep C meds being delivered to patients in the USA)
Of course even with the good outcome the whole thing made a pretty stressful week for my friend and there were a few phone calls back and forth as we worked through the FDA thing.
My friend was very anxious to start treatment and pretty worried because his viral load had recently climbed from 9 million to 12 million and he was thinking that major liver damage was around the corner.
Anyway when he got his meds delivered he was then worried as to whether they were fake or not, so he went and had full blood test, including a viral load test, five days after starting treatment!!!
Yes five days into treatment.
Now to this day I have never heard of anyone getting these tests done that early. Even I waited until day eleven into treatment before getting my first bloods done, and I’m a very impatient patient.
So he phoned me as soon as he got his test results. There was a happy voice on the other end of the telephone...his viral load was down from 12 million to undetected in five days.
WOW!!!
Added to that were great improvements in his liver enzymes.
What a fantastic story. These new Hepatitis C drugs are truly miraculous... what a pity such greedy bastards run the companies that control the patents.
But thank God that we have access to generic Hep C treatment!
