Area veterans with hepatitis C are being cured

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Julian Rojas, coordinator of the Harm Reduction for Injecting Drug Users, shows the needles used by drug addicts users at a drug den in Ciudad Juarez December 13, 2012. The Asociacion Companeros (Comrades Association) runs the Harm Reduction for Injecting Drug Users, supported by Global Fund, that provides packages of sterile syringes to drug addicts, along with a solution to dilute pharmaceutical drugs as well as condoms in an effort to reduce diseases like hepatitis C, tuberculosis and HIV, according to the program. Every month the program provides a package with 30 syringes to 1712 men and 625 women. Picture taken December 13, 2012. REUTERS/Jose Luis Gonzalez (MEXICO - Tags: SOCIETY DRUGS HEALTH) - RTR3BL3H

BY KATIE DEMERIA

After living with hepatitis C for more than 35 years, local resident Charles Otey — along with 500 other veterans — has been cured.

Treatments have been available for hepatitis C — a virus that affects the liver — for the past 20 years, but Otey was hesitant to pursue them until recently. He, like other veterans, feared the mental health-related side effects of the treatments.

“I have friends with hepatitis C, and they took the drug, and they were saying it had side effects like headaches or feeling suicidal,” he said last week.

But after just a 12-week pill regimen, the 61-year-old veteran is free of the virus without having dealt with any side effects.

Otey and the other 500 Richmond-area veterans were the first to be treated at the Hunter hire vetsHolmes McGuire VA Medical Center. The new program is made possible largely by new drugs that have radically changed the landscape of hepatitis C treatment, and to a budget that Congress approved allowing veterans hospitals across the country to pay for the medications.

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