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On March 3, an illegal bio lab was discovered in a believed-to-be vacant building in Reedley, California in Fresno County. City code enforcement stumbled upon the building in December 2022 when they discovered a garden hose running up into the building through a hole in the wall. In March, they obtained a warrant to inspect the property, and in April, the Fresno County Department of Public Health ordered an inspection of the facility. Investigators inspected the building that contained the lab in July and found a room used to make COVID-19 tests and pregnancy tests. They also found over 35...

Why would a COVID lab run by a shady Chinese company be operating in Reedly, CA in the central San Joaquin Valley? The lab, which was supposed to be an empty building, was discovered by Reedly city code enforcement officers when they saw a garden hose attached to the building and investigated.

A new survey of English men who have sex with men (MSM) who were diagnosed with a recently acquired hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection found that 40 percent were HIV-negative, aidsmap reports. Multiple studies have indicated that in Western nations, there has been a rising epidemic of sexually transmitted HCV among HIV-positive MSM since about the turn of the millennium. Hep C does apparently transmit sexually among MSM who do not have HIV but traditionally has done so at a much lower and more stable rate than among their HIV-positive peers. More recent studies have found, however, that hep C...

Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is a growing cause of serious liver problems and liver-related death among people living with HIV now that hepatitis C can be cured, according to research presented at the 2019 International Liver Congress last week in Vienna. As highly effective treatments for hepatitis B and C lead to reduced mortality among people with HIV, “NAFLD is becoming an increasingly important cause of liver disease,” said presenter Zobair Younossi, MD, PhD, of Inova Fairfax Medical Campus in Falls Church, Virginia. In the future, he suggested, NAFLD could become the leading cause of liver disease in this...

Norwegian hepatitis C patients are waiting longer than they should for medical treatment due in part to a monopoly on its supply, according to a report. Between 15,000 and 20,000 Norwegians live with the chronic condition, which is treated with a 12-week course of medicine. The cost of a 12-week course of the Epclusa medicine in Norway is 540,000 kroner (€57,000), according to the Klassekampen newspaper. American pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences owns a monopoly on supply of the medicine in the Scandinavian country, according to the report. […] Ronny Bjørnestad, head of NGO Prolar, which works to improve understanding of...

Pennsylvania prison officials say they will soon begin giving expensive new medication to former death-row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal to treat his hepatitis C infection. The Department of Corrections told a federal judge Friday that Abu-Jamal will be treated with an antiviral medication that can cost $50,000 to $60,000 per patient. Treatment will start next week. …

Patton Couch shook his head and clenched his teeth, recounting the night four years ago when he plucked a dirty needle from a pile at a flophouse and jabbed it into his scarred arm. He knew the odds; most of the addicts in the room probably had hepatitis C. "All I cared about was how soon and how fast I could get it in," he says. "I hated myself, it was misery. But when you're in the grips of it, the only way I thought I could escape it was one more time." Couch, 25 years old and one month...

Gilead Sciences’ new hepatitis C drug receives as much praise for its healing powers as it receives criticism of its price, $84,000 for 12 weeks. Those parallel storylines played out even further in a prominent scientific journal’s latest edition, published online over the weekend.

Former “Baywatch” beauty Pamela Anderson said she was gang-raped by seven boys in high school — including her then-boyfriend — and was also subjected to sexual molestation by a babysitter between the ages of 6 and 10. Ms. Anderson, speaking during the launch of her Pamela Anderson Foundation, said she was raped, too, at the age of 12 by a 25-year-old, NBC News reported. “My first boyfriend in grade nine decided it would be funny to gang-rape me, with six of his friends,” she said, NBC reported, citing a transcript of her speech that was posted on her foundation’s website....

The Great American Giveaway Politics / US Debt Apr 25, 2014 - 04:15 AM GMTBy: Andy Sutton What do the national debt and a designer Hepatitis C drug have in common? This question actually spans two areas near and dear to my heart: economics and medicine. What I’m going to be covering this week is something that I feel is going to be part of a growing trend in America over the coming decades. You see, too many – myself included for quite a while – were asking the wrong questions. Many still are. We shouldn’t be asking what we...

Link only, Bloomberg...Costly new hepatitis C drugs from Gilead, Merck show near total cure rates

Gilead Sciences' (GILD) Sovaldi is now projected to become the best-selling medicine of all time by several analysts. Sovaldi is the first in a new wave of Hep C treatments that promise better cure rates and a shorter treatment course. Some even forecast it would reach $9 billion or more in sales by 2017, at which level it would surpass Pfizer's (PFE) Lipitor and take the crown as the biggest-selling drug of all time. Analysts are trying to outdo each other with optimistic forecasts. According to ISI Group analyst Mark Schoenebaum, if prescriptions were to never grow again, that is...

Gilead Sciences, facing mounting criticism over the high price of its new hepatitis C pill Sovaldi, has offered to supply the medicine to Egypt at a 99 percent discount to the U.S. price. While the drug will still cost $900 for a 12-week course of treatment, that is a fraction of the $84,000 charged for a course of treatment in the United States. The high price tag in America prompted questions from U.S. lawmakers on Friday, after U.S. health insurers said they were seeking help from state health officials to foot the bill. Gilead said it was "pleased to have...

Forty years ago, a beloved neighbor was bedridden for weeks at a time with a mysterious ailment. She knew only that it involved her liver and that she must never drink alcohol, which would make things worse. It was decades before the cause of these debilitating flare-ups was discovered: a viral infection at first called non-A, non-B hepatitis, then properly identified in 1989 as hepatitis C... --snip-- But with two newly approved drugs and a few more in the pipeline, a new era in treatment of hepatitis C is at hand. These regimens are more effective at curing patients and...

Egypt's military has come out with a shocking "medical breakthrough." On Sunday, the army announced its new "Complete Cure Device," which it says can treat cancer and hepatitis C every time, and which doctors call a "scientific scandal." Maj. Gen. Ibrahim Abdel-Atti, head of the Cancer Treatment and Screening center, praised the new device, bragging "I defeated AIDS with the grace of my god at the rate of 100%. And I defeated hepatitis C." According to Abdel-Atti's research team's claims, the device draws blood, "breaks down" the disease, and returns the now cancer-free blood back to the patient, reports CNN....

The Associated Press has been one of the few national media outlets providing at least some coverage of the Kermit Gosnell trial, presumably from their local partners, so they certainly deserve some credit for going where their competitors wouldn’t — at least not until recently.  As with most news outlets following an ongoing story, the AP started looking for fresh angles to frame their stories.  Last night, though, the AP sent out a wire story headlined “Philly abortion workers saw few options,” in which Maryclaire Dale focuses on the employment woes of Gosnell’s co-defendants to explain why they followed Gosnell’s orders...

Contact: Daniela Hernandez dfh2101@columbia.edu 310-991-2391 Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health In a study to be published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers report the discovery of a novel hepatitis C-like virus in dogs. The identification and characterization of this virus gives scientists new insights into how hepatitis C in humans may have evolved and provides scientists renewed hope to develop a model system to study how it causes disease. The research was conducted at the Center for Infection and Immunity (CII) at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, the University...

A former supervisor in the Dayton VA Medical Center’s dental clinic blamed intervention by the NAACP for foiling his efforts in the early 1990s to remove a dentist whose lax infection control practices put patients’ safety at risk. Dr. Dwight M. Pemberton continued to practice dentistry at the Dayton VA, often failing to change latex gloves and sterilize dental instruments between patients...Between 1992 and July 2010, 535 patients who had invasive dental work by Pemberton may have been exposed to bloodborne pathogens, the VA said. Nine have preliminary positive results for hepatitis B or hepatitis C. In the early 1990s,...

Allman Brothers Band cofounder Gregg Allman underwent successful liver transplant surgery this morning, forcing the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame band to cancel its performance at Eric Clapton's Crossroads Guitar Festival at Chicago's Toyota Park on Saturday. The Derek Trucks Band will replace the Allmans on the lineup, which also includes Jeff Beck, John Mayer, B.B. King and Buddy Guy. Check out Rolling Stone's rundown of the Greatest Guitarists of All Time. Allman is being treated at Jacksonville, Florida's Mayo Clinic after battling Hepatitis C for several years. In 2007, the singer was advised that the damage to his...

PATIENTS of a late-term abortion clinic in Victoria may have been deliberately infected with hepatitis C after a further 32 women tested positive to the virus, bringing to 44 the total number of infections. Health authorities and police are investigating allegations a cluster of patients of Melbourne's Croydon Day Surgery became infected with hepatitis C when James Latham Peters worked as an anaesthetist at the clinic over an 18 month period in 2008 and 2009. The state's chief medical officer, John Carnie, said more than 1100 women who attended the clinic had been contacted for blood tests, with 44 so...