Hepatitis C

Dozens of Oklahoma dental patients have been diagnosed with hepatitis C and at least one case of HIV, state health officials said Thursday, four weeks after finding a multitude of health code violations, including rusty tools, at a dental practice in Tulsa. Authorities said they were still determining whether the infections were connected with unsanitary practices at W. Scott Harrington's two offices in Tulsa and a Tulsa suburb, which prompted officials to notify 7,000 of the dentist's patients.

Dozens of Oklahoma dental patients have been diagnosed with hepatitis C and at least one case of HIV, state health officials said Thursday, four weeks after finding a multitude of health code violations, including rusty tools, at a dental practice in Tulsa. Authorities said they were still determining whether the infections were connected with unsanitary practices at W. Scott Harrington's two offices in Tulsa and a Tulsa suburb, which prompted officials to notify 7,000 of the dentist's patients.

By her own admission, Kristen Diane Parker cruised for empty operating rooms at the Denver hospital where she worked. The surgical technician would slip into the rooms and steal syringes of fentanyl, a powerful painkiller, replacing them with syringes she'd filled with saline, she later confessed to investigators. Parker, who has hepatitis C, had allegedly used those decoy syringes -- the source of transmission, authorities believe, for at least 23 Coloradans now infected with the liver-damaging disease.

Oklahoma health officials on Saturday begin testing dental patients in the Tulsa area for a variety of blood-borne viruses that cause hepatitis and AIDS, a precautionary measure to deal with what officials call the largest such incident in the state's history. More than 7,000 patients of Dr. W. Scott Harrington will be receiving letters urging them to seek free blood tests for hepatitis B, hepatitis C and HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. State officials have alleged a variety of unsafe practices, including using dirty equipment and allowing unlicensed workers to perform blood-related procedures, such as sedation, at clinics the dentist operated.

Grammy-winning singer Natalie Cole has been diagnosed with hepatitis C, her publicist said in a statement Wednesday. Hepatitis C is a liver disease spread through contact with infected blood. The statement said the disease was revealed during a routine examination and was likely caused by her drug use years ago. Her physician at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, Dr. Graham Woolf, said Cole, 58, has had a "terrific response to her medication and is now virus negative." He added that this "gives her an increased chance of cure."

Rock singer Steven Tyler says he was diagnosed with hepatitis C three years ago after having the illness for a long time without any symptoms. In an interview that was to air Tuesday on "Access Hollywood," the 58-year-old Aerosmith frontman said the infection was now "nonexistent" in his bloodstream after 11 months of treatment, including the drug interferon.

An experimental antiviral drug that works by a different mechanism than existing drugs has been shown to suppress hepatitis C in chimpanzees and is already being tested in human clinical trials, researchers reported Thursday. The new agent is a so-called antisense drug that binds to RNA required by the virus for replication, preventing the virus from proliferating in the liver. Preliminary tests suggest that the drug, called SPC3649, has no toxic side effects, does not allow development of resistance -- which plagues other hepatitis drugs -- and has lasting effects after treatment has stopped.

At least 81 people treated at a cancer clinic in Fremont have tested positive for hepatitis C in an outbreak that may have been caused by a contaminated vial of medicine, health officials said. Dr. Tom Safranek, the state epidemiologist, said poor medical practices at Dr. Tahir Javed's clinic may be to blame.

The Food and Drug Administration Monday approved a genetically engineered copy of a natural protein for treatment of a common, potentially deadly form of hepatitis. The FDA notified Schering-Plough Corp. of Kenilworth, N. J., that it may market its version of alpha interferon for use against chronic non-A, non-B hepatitis, also known as hepatitis C.

California prison officials are failing to adequately treat an outbreak of hepatitis C that has infected thousands of inmates, a federal class-action lawsuit alleged Tuesday. The lawsuit was filed in Los Angeles on behalf of inmates including Kevin Jackson, who is at the California State Prison at Solano and alleges that he has not received proper treatment since being diagnosed with the disease in August 2007. Up to 40% of the 171,000 inmates in state prisons may be infected with hepatitis C, said Shawn Khorrami, an attorney for Jackson.

In findings that may represent a breakthrough in the treatment of hepatitis C infection, researchers have reported that weekly injections of an experimental medication that denies the virus a foothold in the liver substantially drove down subjects' viral loads after five weeks of treatment. Fourteen weeks after the injections ended, researchers found that five of 18 infected subjects getting the medication's higher doses showed no detectable trace of infection. The new study describes a treatment approach that could outsmart the hepatitis C virus's penchant for developing resistance to existing drugs and "provide curative therapy to a large proportion" of the 170 million people in the world who are infected with the virus, wrote Harvard University physician Dr. Judy Lieberman and Dr. Peter Sarnow of Stanford University.

WASHINGTON - A nomadic medical technician who wandered in and out of hospital jobs from the desert Southwest to New England was indicted Thursday by a federal grand jury in connection with a Hepatitis C outbreak that infected more than 30 patients at a New Hampshire hospital with the potentially life-threatening disease, and possibly 4,000 more in Pennsylvania, Maryland and other states. David M. Kwiatkowski, a  33-year-old former radiology tech, was charged with seven counts of tampering with a consumer product and seven counts of obtaining controlled substances by fraud.

WASHINGTON - A nomadic medical technician who held hospital jobs from Arizona to New England has been indicted in connection with a hepatitis C outbreak that infected more than 30 patients at a New Hampshire hospital and exposed thousands of others in Pennsylvania, Maryland and other states. David M. Kwiatkowski, a 33-year-old former radiology technician, was charged Wednesday by a federal grand jury with seven counts of tampering with a consumer product and seven counts of obtaining controlled substances by fraud, the Justice Department said Thursday.

I consider myself to be a fortunate person. I have a good education, a great job and excellent health insurance. I am a baby boomer who has aged reasonably well and can look forward to a fairly comfortable retirement. I am also fortunate because I was diagnosed with hepatitis C by a proactive and knowledgeable doctor in the late 1990s and had the opportunity to be treated and cured. The odds are that if I had not been diagnosed and treated, I would be on a liver transplant list right now, have liver cancer or even be dead from this disease.

Silymarin, an extract of milk thistle widely used around the world for treating liver disease caused by the hepatitis C virus, provides no more benefit than a placebo, researchers reported this week. Some estimates are that as many as a third of the estimated 3.2 million Americans with hepatitis C -- as well as many more millions around the world -- are consuming the drug in an effort to alleviate their symptoms. The new research by a team headed by Dr. Michael W. Fried of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine suggests that they are simply wasting their money.

More than a quarter of L.A.'s homeless adults are infected with the hepatitis C virus, and nearly half of them don't know it, UCLA researchers reported this week. Almost none of them have been treated for the infection, suggesting that the public health system could face a major financial burden as their infections progress to cirrhosis of the liver and end-stage liver disease. The hepatitis C virus, known as HCV, represents a potentially lethal infection. It is transmitted through the blood, primarily by needles used for injecting drugs.

Schering-Plough Corp. said Wednesday it has received regulatory approval to sell two hepatitis C drugs in a combination package that's expected to become the new "gold standard" for treating a disease that affects 4 million Americans. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said the New Jersey pharmaceuticals company can sell Peg-Intron, a longer-lasting form of its Intron A drug, in a single-package combination with its Rebetol drug from ICN Pharmaceuticals Inc.

Hepatitis C, a potentially deadly disease that has become the nation's leading cause of liver transplants, silently stalks more than 3 million Americans but remains largely off the radar screen of public health. Although the disease is believed to infect more than four times as many Americans as the human immunodeficiency virus, it has only recently been targeted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in a national battle plan.

Re "Hepatitis a new worry for baby boomers," May 2 In the late 1960s I was a Peace Corps volunteer teaching school in Uganda. I became ill and required blood transfusions. Fast forward 30 years and I'm donating my own blood for surgery. Imagine my surprise when the Red Cross informed me that I had hepatitis C, something I had never heard of. I had contracted it from those long-ago transfusions. Once my initial panic subsided, I was fortunate to find an excellent heptologist who eventually persuaded me to undergo treatment.

The number of baby boomers dying from a "silent epidemic" of hepatitis C infections is increasing so rapidly that federal officials are planning a new nationwide push for widespread testing. Three in four of the estimated 3.2 million people who have chronic hepatitis C - and a similar proportion of those who die from the disease - are baby boomers. Deaths from the virus nearly doubled between 1999 and 2007 to more than 15,000, according to a recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study.