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.
Good for you! Could you share the name of that particular test here? I'm confident I'm clear but might want to include that test in case I need to in the future.
hep c antibody basically
if positive they will probably do hep c viral load<p><a href="https://www.labcorp.com/tests/144050/hepatitis-c-virus-hcv-antibody-with-reflex-to-quantitative-real-time-pcr" rel="nofollow">https://www.labcorp.com/tests/144050/hepatitis-c-virus-hcv-a...</a>
A standard STi clinic should have you covered. They <i>should</i> do the full pipecleaner wee and blood check
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:<p>- Syphilis<p>- Hep B<p>- Hep C<p>- HIV 1 and 2 and P24<p>- Chlamydia<p>- Gonorrhoea
I forgot to mention my experience was in the northeastern USA in the 2000s-2010s. I’m happy you got a better standard of care than I did!
Hep C screening at least once for adults >= 18 is recommended and considered standard of care in the United States. I checked my medical records and I have a negative Hep C result in an old checkup when I was younger, and another one from a new provider who insisted on a big panel of standard testing for new patients (despite me having no risk factors).<p>It’s unfortunate that your early providers dropped the ball. I wonder if they assumed you had already been tested for some reason?
You had me curious about what I was tested for, also in the northeastern USA in the 2010s. It looks like they included Hep C when my PCP ordered STD tests in 2015, along with most of the tests the other commenter mentioned. I'm glad they caught yours in time to treat it well!
Ah OK, this was in London
In Europe I don't think it's commonly done. For example, the standard Dutch MSM STI test [1] covers HIV, Syphilis, Chlamydia, and Gonorrhoea only while Trichomoniasis, HPV 2 and Herpes are rather common. That being said, it's freely available at most hospitals.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.mantotman.nl/" rel="nofollow">https://www.mantotman.nl/</a>
Herpes screening is discouraged in the US unless symptoms are present as the widely available IgG tests have terrible specificity. While the false negative rate is practically 0, they have a false positive rate of around 20%. The only high-accuracy confirmatory test (at least in the US) is the Western Blot but there's only a handful of labs in the country that offer it.<p>The current tests would result in a substantial fraction of the population running around thinking they have a highly stigmatized STI that they in fact do not have with little to zero ways of getting a more accurate test.
> HPV 2 and Herpes are rather common<p>Seems like both HSV-1 and HSV-2 seroprevalences are actually rather low in the Netherlands.<p>As for STI testing: Serological testing is pretty meaningless regarding infection risk and direct viral detection is only done on visible lesions for differential diagnostics AFAIK. You can shed the virus without lesions, HSV-1 can be contracted without direct mucosa contact, and while HSV-1 is associated with oral herpes and HSV-2 with genital herpes, both types can cause lesions anywhere on the body. Sure someone without positive antibody status very likely can't transmit it, but that's a very small minority of people of relevant age.<p>I believe talking to Americans about "herpes" can be misleading, as it's weirdly stigmatized over there and people seemingly conflate visible "cold sores", genital herpes and antibody status.<p>Incidentally, genital herpes and HSV-2 in general is more common in the US, which may be a direct outcome of this cultural dynamic. Due to lower incidences of early oral HSV-1 infections, compared to most western Europe, Americans are more likely to get infected with genital herpes of either type, but in particular HSV-2, too. Prior oral HSV-1 infections are somewhat protective.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_herpes_simplex" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_herpes_simplex</a>
Note that doesn't include HSV (especially 2) which can be transmitted asymptomatically, and even with a condom. The medical establishment doesn't consider it a concern, but it's worth having both parties check.
Hep C isn't commonly sexually transmitted so it's odd they would test for it. It's more of a concern in certain occupations, like healthcare, where you may come into contact with blood.
i think during that time / place it was risk based - if you didn't know your parent had it (or didn't tell your dr), and weren't an intravenous drug user, etc. its likely no one would have screened for it.
Meanwhile, the USA is bringing back measles, mumps, rubella, Hep B, and lots of intestinal parasites. Back to the Future! MAGA!
This planet had always belonged to the fungi and the bacteria, the viruses and the protists.<p>It wasn't until the trump administration that I started to suspect that they're actively tampering with human politics.
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I mean this is liberal/left heavy, it's to be expected, you can't just rummage in and expect people to be like hm good points you're right! when most of the audience is against you<p>it's expected<p>if you could delve into what supports your arguments that'd help more than "trust me instead"<p>I personally am skeptical of many things, including pharma, but I'm not going to claim that vaccines don't work when historically they have, and I'd have to do a bunch of research to prove an internet argument wrong.<p>do I think that covid vaccines were/are 100% safe and totally not rushed due to the pandemic? no.
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Every vaccine licensed for use in the USA has a clinical review memo that list the adverse events that you claim are dismissed. You live in an imaginary fantasy world.
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There are two kinds of vaccine skeptics: a much larger group of people who will in fact have conversations about costs and benefits, and a small group of cranks like yourself that should be treated like the drooling imbeciles that they are.<p>- Don't live in California<p>- Risks are considered, but you will never be satisfied<p>- Long-term risks have been studied with very good methodology.
Not that anyone who needs this will read it, but "skeptic" does not mean "already made up your mind and will never change it".<p>People were "skeptical" of vaccines. Then they did science. Now they aren't. Then, yes, people like the guy trying starting this thread who will never be convinced and cannot change his mind.
Why dont you ask your doctor these things?
> <i>HN pretends there's nothing to discuss here.</i><p>Have you <i>read</i> the discussions on vaccine stories? See, for example, <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26629234">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26629234</a> – chosen arbitrarily using the search box at the bottom of the page. I've not read anyone pretending this.<p>> <i>shut up</i><p>People are being dismissive of you, but <i>nobody</i> has told you to shut up in this thread. (The closest thing is flagging the comments which started with broad-spectrum insults, but this only occurred <i>after</i> you wrote this.) Despite its tone, I'm going to have to second GP's assessment that you're responding to imagined slights.
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So I'm not an expert, but I did take immunology last semester... You're definitely right that we'd benefit from more study of the long term downstream effects of adjuvants. When you put the immune system on high alert, it sometimes remembers the wrong thing from the experience and continues to target it later.<p>But you've got to weigh those risks against the risk of dragging our feet on rolling out new vaccines. It's likely that many autoimmune diseases are caused by pathogens which are either undiscovered, or which are known, but whose link to the autoimmune disease is undiscovered. This is because there is evolutionary pressure encouraging pathogens to resemble self-antigens. If a pathogen has markers that cause it to resemble the human liver, the human adaptive immune system won't <i>typically</i> attack it because it wants to avoid attacking its own liver. So the pathogen is safe. This is called molecular mimicry. But the mimicry isn't perfect, so sometimes the immune system <i>does</i> become sensitized to the pathogen, attacks it, clears it, and starts slowly attacking the liver (or whichever tissue bears the same epitope as the mimic). It shows up years later as an autoimmune disease, but the data just isn't there to isolate its cause to that pathogen.<p>So the best strategy, if we can pull it off, is to vaccinate against the original pathogen (or prevent it via other means... clean food and water, etc), but to target epitopes which do not resemble any human tissues, and with adjuvants that do not sensitize the immune system against any human tissues.<p>As for how long adjuvants stay in the body, it's definitely worth studying more, but their whole function is to sound the alarm, so I'd expect that they're cleared rather quickly. Anything that fails to do that is by definition not an adjuvant. But assuming that an inappropriate response was triggered in the first place, you'd see the same effects whether or not the adjuvant was still around: If the initial exposure has triggered clonal replication of whichever B and T cells attack the antigen, self or otherwise, they'll stick around in your lymph nodes for years and years, and they'll re-up their numbers with each subsequent exposure.
It didn't start out as liberal/left, so a lot of the people that have been here since 2010 want to keep most politics out it entirely. After all the name of the group is "Hackers". Most of the people in compsci/engineering were libertarian prior to 2007 anyway. It's really undergone a shift which is fine, but it actually adds absolutely nothing, from an intellectual point of view imho.
It would be nice to at least send a warning note, to any accounts that solely post political stuff here - or give them their own subgroup.
For God's sake if you are going to talk about Hepatis-C then talk about here, rather than using it to bring up issues with an administration you don't like.
I blame Facebook and not MAGA for this. Amplification is insane.
That's the irony of MAGA: they make everything worse while making nothing great.
and screw worms
America: hold my syringe...
Plus, they're trying to jail someone who, apparently, was focused on making the correct scientific choices for the covid vaccine during the peak of the pandemic.<p>The lead Fox News "article" plainly stated that the COVID shots cause an 87% miscarriage rate.<p>This has nothing to do with reality -- and they absolutely do not care about fighting "fair."
Not only bringing back but also exporting it.<p>Currently we have a measles outbreak in Brazil brought from the US, so everybody is getting vaccinated (even those who already were, like me) to try to stop the spreading and protect those who can’t get vaccinated.<p>Really would love for US social and media networks to get their shit together and stop spreading misinformation in the name of profit…
Strangely, anti-vax sentiment is surging in a lot of countries. Canada has higher rates of vaccine rejection than the United States in some categories, as one example.<p>It’s a strange global phenomenon and I don’t think there is one single root cause. MAGA/MAHA definitely jumped on to the anti-vax train as it became popular, but many forget that Trump presided over the rushing of the COVID vaccine into availability and production. He hasn’t done vaccination any favors in recent years, but I’m skeptical that the widespread rise of vaccine skepticism can be attributable to this administration alone.<p>I think there’s a bigger story about the cyclical nature of how the dangers of threats that previous generations faced is slowly lost over time, combined with the rise of contrarianism and conspiratorial thinking on social media.
Given the amount of cultural influence the USA has and the universal nature of the internet it seems likely to me that global anti-vax sentiment could have started with the USA.
Looking at global population stats, you can clearly see where germ theory and vaccines entered human civilization.<p>All this "natural something" and antivax movement certainly is the other direction. Maybe it's subconscious population control, maybe informational warfare... maybe people just got a little detached from reality by not dying all the time, as you suggested.
Anti-vaxxing goes back literally centuries, but the internet definitely made it a THING.
I just looked it up and anti-vax arguments predate actual vaccines - they were used for variolation which was similar:<p>>in a 1722 sermon entitled "The Dangerous and Sinful Practice of Inoculation", the English theologian Reverend Edmund Massey argued that diseases are sent by God to punish sin and that any attempt to prevent smallpox via inoculation is a "diabolical operation"<p>Vaccines date from about 1800.
I would blame the "social" media, on the old internet they had barely any visibility.<p>Now that we have the blame let's talk about the punishment.
> I would blame the "social" media, on the old internet they had barely any visibility.<p>They managed to get plenty of visibility long before computers.<p><a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leicestershire-50713991" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leicestershire-50713991</a><p>> There followed a 100-year battle between the authorities and an often sceptical, sometimes aggressive, public. In Britain, a succession of laws made vaccinations free, then compulsory - backed by fines and even imprisonment. While riots flared in some towns, there was also more restrained opposition in the form of anti-vaccination leagues. For an increasingly literate population, pamphlets were produced with titles like "Vaccination: its fallacies and evils", "Vaccination, a Curse" and the suitably Gothic "Horrors of Vaccination".
I am very prepared to get downvoted for bringing this up - but I'm not convinced that the "anti-vax movement" most people think of is truly to blame (that is, crazy people who think it gives you autism or whatever).<p>At least in my area, there are pockets of (relatively) new immigrants that have MMR vaccination rates at around 30% (that's very low, much lower than the anti-vaxxer population could account for imo), and the reasons for that have nothing to do with MAGA/MAHA as far as I can tell.<p>It's an entirely different problem (that needs solving), and pretending that this is simply the by-product of uneducated crazies on the internet feels like it's over indexing on a loud and flashy but ultimately small part of the problem.
the data is quite slow to be released so i haven't updated my charts for a bit but britain saw a decent spike in HIV / AIDS because of the migratory flows under boris johnson. In large part because we don't test on the basis that it's considered racist (I went looking for discourse on testing on entry or not - first article that came up was from the graun, first words "Nigel Farage").
Before MAGA I'd heard of granola moms, the same people who think that amber helps their kid with teething, were very against vaccinating their kids as well. So it's a wide swath of people who are just oblivious to the benefits of vaccination. It's a reason that they have vaccine schedules to begin with.
Would you say that the government telling those people that they should be afraid of vaccines will help or hurt in this case?
I gotta be honest, I don't really think these immigrant groups see or care what Trump/RFK are saying. If anything they see them as an "enemy" who they should not trust.. This is an incredibly left-leaning city where the majority of public health information (or any other messaging) being disseminated is counter to what the current federal admin is saying (as a rule, it seems).<p>So to answer your question, I don't personally think it helps or hurts in any significant amount relative to other cultural drivers.
I don't think people base their beliefs purely based on what the administration says<p>the whole rollout and lockdowns, Fauci, etc. were a perfect storm to cause skepticism towards vaccines
I don't think it was the roll-out or anything along those lines, so much as the lying. Saying people won't get sick or won't catch COVID if they get the vaccines [1] was just false and very myopic. Obviously the intent was to try to get people to take the shots, but they completely destroyed trust in the process. Broader skepticism predictably follows from there.<p>[1] - <a href="https://xcancel.com/ITGuy1959/status/1581034815700488192" rel="nofollow">https://xcancel.com/ITGuy1959/status/1581034815700488192</a>
They are not the progenitors of the skepticism, but they gave the skeptics significantly more authority than they previously had. Over surveillance networks, vaccine scheduling, public health comms, etc. MAGA sees them as useful idiots for the coalition, rather than threats to the US.
Here [1] is a montage of some of the public messaging around the COVID vaccines. [1] It was quite simply dishonest. That, paired alongside the effort to force people to take the shots, completely destroyed public trust on a level that will take many decades to repair. Generalized vaccine skepticism follows naturally from that.<p>I'm certainly a part of that group. For instance I ended up doing extensive research on e.g. MMR before deciding to vaccinate my kids for it. If this were a decade ago, I almost certainly would have done it without a second thought, just as I took all recommended vaccines before traveling without a second thought. So I'm obviously not anti-vaccine in the least, but I no longer trust public messaging on the topic.<p>It was just another (of the increasingly endless) examples of governments/companies pursuing short-term interests while ignoring long-term consequences. When it comes to what people put in their bodies, trust is more important than literally anything else.<p>[1] - <a href="https://xcancel.com/ITGuy1959/status/1581034815700488192" rel="nofollow">https://xcancel.com/ITGuy1959/status/1581034815700488192</a>
But this has been building for years ahead of COVID. COVID just gave people something to latch on to. And in spite of COVID vaccine issues, the latest numbers i saw suggest around 80% of people still support standard childhood vaccinations.
The media has been referencing this for years now, but the data don't show that there was any meaningful effect on a national level. Here [1] are CDC data on various childhood vaccines. Childhood DTP/MMR vaccination rates varied very little over the past 15 years and never fell below 94%. They actually hit a record high in 2019 right before COVID - of about 95% each. Now they're both at record lows (around 92%) and continuing to trend lower.<p>[1] - <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/schoolvaxview/data/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cdc.gov/schoolvaxview/data/index.html</a>
Why is it bad for a public health communicator to say that vaccines stop spread by lowering the effective reproduction number of a pathogen? Its correct. Your extensive research didn't seem to work.
You have your chain of logic backwards. You wanted to be skeptical and "concerned" and so forth so you went out and found reasons to justify it.
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interesting. so if you get a bacterial infection, you plan to succumb to it rather than take antibiotics?
I'm not that extremist. My dentist is cool, my childrens' pediatrician as well. I trust them entirely and I know they would never compromise their credibility or my health for financial gain. I always take medicine they prescribe (mostly generic stuff whose patents expired a century or so ago). They always steer me to healthy habits such as excercise and eating fruits instead of taking supplements etc.<p>Unfortunately, they are the only ones like that I know. Most other I encountered just peddle products for their financial gain. Snake oil salesmen.<p>I am aware I live in a dictatorship which drove a lot of smart and good people away from the country, skilled doctors and nurses were among the first to go. Hopefully it'll get better once we overthrow the dictator.
When did that particular switch flip?
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People were refusing the measles vaccine back in 2000
Yes, the debacle around the COVID vaccine really ruined credibility for a lot of vaccines.
Not sure why the parent was downvoted, because I think it nails the current sentiment.<p>For some people the COVID vaccine(s) were rushed to market, with limited clinical trials, intended to vaccinate the entire adult population, with limited data as to their immediate effectiveness and with no data about long term effects. You can debate whether the above points are valid or not, but for some people they certainly raised a safety flag.<p>I completely agree that the vaccine scepticism around the COVID vaccines is now carrying over into other, well tested, well understood and very, very beneficial vaccines.
I'm not a trump fan, but the antivax train has <i>nothing</i> to do with him. (Evidence: Canada is doing even worse then us when it comes to measles). If we want to fix this problem (we do), the first step is to recognize the actual problem, not to play the blame game on whichever politician you currently don't like!
You don't think RFK has anything to do with it?
The reason there are measles cases is because a decent percentage of people aren't getting vaccinated anymore. If all of the cases were 2 year olds or younger (when RFK was put in charge) then possibly. But not only are they older (<a href="https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html</a>), this is also happening in Canada. I don't see how it could possibly be RFK's fault.
True, but RFK (and other politicians and celebrities) have been active in pushing some form of anti-vax ideology for a decade plus, in some cases back to the 1970s.<p>It's been a growing movement, not something that kicked off when RFK assumed the HHS role.
While It’s fair to point out that RFK is hopping on a train that’s already got momentum, your first comment reads as if it’s not caused by falling vaccination rates (your second comment clarified further).<p>Also why not blame politicians doing the wrong thing?
Perhaps I should've been clearer. And yes they aren't helping.<p>And yes, we should blame them for the things they do. T
But the comment I was responding to was acting as if MAGA was <i>the</i> reason for measles outbreaks, which is false. I'm an incredibly strong believer in the truth. An example of why I think this is an important separation: imagine you tried to fix the measles outbreak and miraculously got every single American to hate Trump and got Trump out of office. The problem would still not be fixed! People would still be dying of measles! The effort would have been almost completely wasted!
COVID and anti-vaxxing explosion happened 6 years ago.
RFK has publicly come out and encouraged parents to get vaccinated for measles. I don't know why you are spreading disinformation.<p><a href="https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/article/rfk-jr-says-parents-should-vaccinate-children-against-measles-as-us-cases-hit-a-35-year-high-160031759.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/article/rfk-jr-says-pare...</a>
You think the Trump influence magically stops at the border? There are _plenty_ of Canadians who think Trump has all the answers and can't be wrong.
He knows he can't push his base too hard on certain things. He probably knows this about vaccines, he lauds Operation Warp Speed but as a win of his not a vaccine that could have saved millions more with his cooperation. He chooses his power over what's best for all of us. He's the leader of the antivax train by choice.
"Evidence" requires citations.
US: <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html</a><p>Canada: <a href="https://health-infobase.canada.ca/measles-rubella/archive/2025/" rel="nofollow">https://health-infobase.canada.ca/measles-rubella/archive/20...</a><p>They have 10% our population and had twice the cases last year (admittedly, we're starting to catch up). But the truth is that there are huge lag times when it comes to measles / antivax. This is a symptom of a problem that started 10-20 years ago.
You are willfully deluding yourself if you believe that. He put an anti-vax idiot as head of HHS. How is that "nothing"?
He was appointed and holds those views <i>because</i> these ideas are now popular... not the other way around.
See my other responses. Do you really think RFK could possibly have had an effect on vaccinations over the last 2 decades in the US OR Canada?<p>Since you seem very emotionally opposed to Trump and his administration: I also don't like Trump or RFK! However, to solve a problem, you have to find the root cause of the problem, and pointing at the most recent politician you hate will never help anyone.
We can't solve the root cause until we fight our way through trump and his party.
YES.<p>Do you really think RFK appeared out of the ether? What do you think he's spent the last 2 decades doing?
<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/10/trump-vaccines-executive-order-measles" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/10/trump-vaccin...</a><p>"The order recommends that all shots be given at separate medical visits, a frequent point Trump has made despite the safety, ease and lower costs of giving vaccines together."<p>'“Together, there could be a possibility they’re quite lethal,” Trump said of the MMR vaccine at the signing of the order on Monday.'<p>'Asked if he had evidence that the combined MMR vaccine was “lethal”, Trump said: “No. What I’ve heard is that there are some people who say it is that way.”'<p>Antivax fundamentally has its contemporary roots in Andrew Wakefield's fraudulent anti-MMR campaign.<p>So directing by executive order and by his own admission <i>without evidence</i> that the MMR vaccine be split up into separate shots is, very clearly, an antivax action. This is the first victory that Wakefield (a man who had a patent on a single measles vaccine!) wanted, and RFK Jr was pursuing.<p>But this is Trump saying this and signing it. So as of yesterday, it now has everything to do with Trump, sorry. He has handed the anti-MMR movement its ultimate victory and in so doing validated the entire antivax worldview.
See my other responses. Obviously this is bad. But the current measles outbreak is a symptom of a problem that's been happening over the last 1 or 2 decades. It literally CANNOT be caused by this, neither in the US or Canada.<p>It's still not too late for anyone who is unvaccinated to get the vaccine! Hopefully the next administration undoes this change, but the really important part is managing to shrink the anti-vax movement (which, if you look at the data in my other comments, you can see has been a problem since before Trump).
What exactly do you consider "before trump"?<p>Also, trump, as a representative, represents a large group of people. It's colloquial to refer to political parties by their leaders.
FWIW I think Trump #1 (45) wasn't an anti-vax presidency; it might have been suspicious of healthcare professionals (for the good reason that so many people know opioid epidemic victims) and he was always a bit equivocal around hydroxychloroquine and bleach and "powerful light inside the body" but Trump didn't start to lean antivax until not long after Biden took over.<p>(And let's be clear: Operation Warp Speed was an enormous success even if Trump is an ignoramus)<p>Some of that might have been expediency — Biden was catching shit from the antivax and healthcare-skeptical movement and moving in on that would be easy — but Trump has always been vulnerable to being influenced by people and RFK Jr appears to be generally so much more persuasive than bears thinking about, so he was a factor later on.<p>Trump #2 (47) is fully an anti-vax presidency; even Hegseth backed away from flu vaccine mandates, only to have an outbreak in an Army (IIRC?) facility.
It has a lot to do with him. He doesn't actually have an opinion on any policy issue. For various political reasons, Trump decided to let RFK dictate public health policy according to his extremely delusional ideas. Yes, there was an antivax movement in this country for many years, just as there has been misogyny, racism, and transphobia. Trump has normalized and supercharged all of these moronic and dangerous ideas.<p>I have not been following measles in Canada, so I can't address that.
See my other comments; it is not possible for RFK to have had any effect on this outbreak. If everyone getting measles was 2 or under, it could be possible; they aren't.<p>The reason I bring up Canada is as counterevidence; if it was Trump or RFK'S fault, Canada should be doing just fine. They had twice the cases last year in 1/10 the population. The truth is this is a problem with people believing stupid things, and it's going to take a lot more than Trump going out of office to fix.
RFK has been the person behind the antivax movement for a long time.
> it's going to take a lot more than Trump going out of office to fix<p>Probably true, but it's nevertheless a necessary condition.
1) Vaccines are not 100% effective. 2) Herd immunity is a thing.
Trump is trying to hang Fauci. That goes in the completely opposite direction of promoting the trust of medical institutions in general society, and it's trust that will get people back to vaccinating themselves and their children.
He is amplifying the issue, but you're right, Trump is a symptom of the underlying problem. The problem is that internet gave these idiots a platform to mislead people.<p>Back in the early 90s this wasn't much of a problem. Childhood vaccine requirements weren't some hot-button topic then. Most people would just get them when faced with the requirement. Most opposition was isolated to people who were otherwise contrarians already.<p>The difference now is that the internet is full of these isolated contrarians who are now influencing gullible people who don't know who to trust.
Are you blaming communication technology?
I'm blaming the current social media landscape, which amplifies ideas based on the engagement they create, which has an unintended consequence of amplifying exciting controversial falsehoods over long-held boring truths. We have given the largest megaphones to the biggest village idiots.
Neither phones, nor email, not even usenet had this impact. Social media did.<p>The problem is not with the technology but those that control it. (Some would probably say, the fact that any one actor controls it in the first place.)<p>Our only means of communication in modern society are a few advertising platforms in hands of even fewer owners, and the engineers hired to run it are busy engagementmaxxing.
Do you think it's also helpful that they see these things being pushed "for profit)
Completely agree! I will add though: this is a symptom of a problem that started 10-20 years ago. There's a lot of lag time between parents not giving their babies vaccines and outbreaks actually happening. You can see ages here.(<a href="https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html</a>) 5 and under are only 20% of cases.
> this is a symptom of a problem that started 10-20 years ago.<p>... and that's right when social media gained majority adoption among US adults.
More like 25+ years ago. In the early 2000s you saw a lot of celebrities pushing vaccine fear because they read some book version of "doctors don't want you to know this one wierd fact" that made the best-seller list or another. I remember people arguing about it in college classes, and I graduated in 2003.
Putting an anti-vax conspiracy theorist in charge of health is <i>not</i> the way to do it.
"has nothing to do with it" is not the same as "is not the cause of". Trump and antivax definitely are related as both are symptoms of the same public strategy that spreads misinformation, polarizes discourse and weaponizes stupidity.
>> Canada is doing even worse then us when it comes to measles<p>Not in Canada but unfortunately US nonsense spreads globally pretty quickly these days. The amount of Trump support in the UK is both bizarre and surprising. When someone with the worlds largest megaphone lies about vaccines, unfortunately people everywhere listen.
Right, because tapping one of the world's biggest vaccine truthers to run the Department of HHS and then proceed to link autism with vaccines and change the recommended MMR vaccine scheduling for children has absolutely no impact on anyone.<p>I can't help but feel this is ragebait or a bot.
He was literally spreading FUD about vaccines today. And the measles stuff has got so bad RFK had to mildy backtrack on his previous antivax statements in recent interviews.<p>From today:<p>Both Trump and Kennedy made repeated mentions of autism throughout the order signing, emphasizing a scientifically unproven link between vaccines and the condition. Dozens of studies show no link between the two.<p>“Today we’re proud to officially announce the United States of America’s gold standard childhood vaccination recommendations. That has to do with many subjects including autism in particular,” Trump said at the beginning of the order signing.<p>“I’ve seen proof of it, where they have a vaccination where it looks like the size of a bottle of soda, poured into a little child’s body and bad things happen in too many cases,” Trump later said on breaking up each shot into an individual medical visit, before adding: “This is an explosion, it’s an epidemic,” in an apparent reference to autism.
>I'm not a trump fan, but the antivax train has nothing to do with him.<p>Well not nothing. But it predates him and he adopted the movement early in his political career. When I was in high school (2004-8) antivax sentiment was generally associated with liberal Democrats in places like Marin County. This was a favorite retort of conservatives when confronted with their own backwardness on scientific understanding of evolution and climate change. In 2015 Trump began courting the anti-vaccine crowd and the political valence of that flavor of woo-woo nonsense flipped seemingly overnight. It was surreal to see it happen in real time. By 2020 he had lost control of the monster he helped create and the crowd booed him when he said they should get the Covid vaccine.
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When you bring millions of people into the country from places where these diseases run rampant, of course the rate of spread will spike.<p>This has been fed policy for decades.<p>Should surprise no one.
the other side of this is the science behind the NS5B protein and the meds behind the new hep c cures. This is pretty fascinating stuff. In medicine, it's not often we see a cure like this.
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.
Each nation has different social and health issues, each nation makes its own plan.<p>All four nations NHSes work with a single charity, the Hep C Trust.<p>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).<p><a href="https://www.hepctrust.org.uk/blog/2026/07/four-nations-on-the-road-to-elimination-for-world-hepatitis-day-2026/" rel="nofollow">https://www.hepctrust.org.uk/blog/2026/07/four-nations-on-th...</a><p>As for progress:<p>- July 2026: Wales doesn't have percentage-of-population counts but here's its latest report: <a href="https://phw.nhs.wales/reports/trends-in-the-prevention-diagnosis-and-treatment-of-hepatitis-b-and-hepatitis-c-in-wales-annual-surveillance-report-2026-data-to-end-of-2025/" rel="nofollow">https://phw.nhs.wales/reports/trends-in-the-prevention-diagn...</a><p>- November 2025: Scotland believes it has identified and is treating 85% of chronic sufferers: <a href="https://publichealthscotland.scot/publications/surveillance-of-hepatitis-c-in-scotland/surveillance-of-hepatitis-c-in-scotland-progress-on-elimination-of-hepatitis-c-as-a-major-public-health-concern-2025-update/" rel="nofollow">https://publichealthscotland.scot/publications/surveillance-...</a><p>- 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) <a href="https://www.health-ni.gov.uk/publications/northern-ireland-hepatitis-c-elimination-plan" rel="nofollow">https://www.health-ni.gov.uk/publications/northern-ireland-h...</a>
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.
Each country also has their own Public Health bodies, so pretty much everything related to health is devolved
Makes me wonder if this project is the reason for a slight downturn in Liver cancer from 2019 forward in the UK.<p><a href="https://crukcancerintelligence.shinyapps.io/CancerStatsDataHub/_w_a3a611fa8d3349debdb42a4cf464b205/?_inputs_&nav=%22Incidence%20Breakdowns%20and%20Trends%22&app_select_CancerSite=%22Liver%22&app_select_Country=%22United%20Kingdom%22" rel="nofollow">https://crukcancerintelligence.shinyapps.io/CancerStatsDataH...</a>
I guess someone complained about memory safety and they intend to rewrite hepatitis in Rust.<p>Not everything has to be rewritten in Rust! Hepatitis is a virus, C is much better suited for that kind of project, Rust is for fungal diseases, not viruses.
Good for you. We get explosive diarrhea as the prize in the States. Wanna trade?
I've always found it a bit surprising that we don't all celebrate smallpox elimination day. I think it'd be a great reminder of the victories that humanity has had against the four horsemen.
I got really sad reading Good Omens where Pestilence has retired because of all the progress of medical science and thinking "if only". Funny enough, Pratchett has Famine doing exactly what's working for Pestilence today, convincing people to make bad choices despite easy ways to avoid the horsemen's influence.
> Around 50,200 adults are living with hepatitis C, figures for England in 2024 suggest.<p>> Estimates indicate 84.6% of those living with hepatitis C have been diagnosed - just short of the 90% target.<p>How do they know there are that many Hep C patients if they haven’t been diagnosed?
Introducing: Hepatitis C++
What a funny headline. It has virtually nothing to do with the actual content of the article.
This is great news. Healthcare is such an asset in our pockets.
For a second, I thought Hepatitis C was some 1980s C dialect that had memory safety issues.
We eliminated TB too. Then it came back.
Second paraggraph:<p>> 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.<p>What is needed by 2030? There is no mention prior to this statement.<p>Later:<p>> NHS England says that since 2015, more than 100,000 people have been diagnosed and treated for hepatitis C, meaning the country is already meeting that target.<p>Again, what target are we talking about??<p>Much later:<p>> Prof Frankie Swords, NHS national medical director, added: "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.<p>Finally a target!<p>FUCK AI
This isn't written by AI, this is just how BBC news articles are written. I find it frustrating too.
I think you are partially correct. They trained AI on their articles to produce the same style articles. I am not a large consumer of BBC articles. This style of snippet after snippet is annoying. Perhaps that is why I am not a large consumer of BBC articles.<p>> Style Assist helps BBC journalists quickly adapt trusted content into BBC News house style, speeding up the publication of high-quality local stories. It uses a BBC-trained AI model to generate a draft, which is always reviewed and edited by journalists before publication. This helps save time while maintaining accuracy, tone and editorial standards. Find out more in an article from Rhodri Talfan Davies.<p><a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/reports/policies/what-were-doing-with-ai/" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/reports/policies/what-were...</a>
Style Assist is mainly for articles written by journalists that are employed by third-party news organisations (who own the UK's local news outlets) but are subsidised by the BBC - these people are "local democracy reporters".<p>LDRS articles are made free to everyone in the scheme (including the BBC), but because the content is written primarily for their home news org the articles that end up being published by the BBC need to be modified to comply with the BBC's editorial guidelines and for style reasons.<p>Hence, Style Assist.
It's not AI the BBC is just that bad at news. Serious read anything by them at it's like they hate real information and just want random ass quotes from people.
Instead of not including the target, AI would have confidently stated some incorrect number.
Wait is England a country or nation?
it's a country and a nation, but not a nation state.
Yes.<p>(Seriously you couldn't google that?)
How can there not be a single sentence in that article HOW IS IT TREATED<p>If it requires a vaccine you can be sure HEP C will be kept alive and well via MAHA in the US<p>okay here is a much better article<p>* <a href="https://www.england.nhs.uk/2026/08/100000-people-receive-treatment-to-cure-deadly-hep-c-virus-on-nhs-in-just-ten-years/" rel="nofollow">https://www.england.nhs.uk/2026/08/100000-people-receive-tre...</a><p>> <i>"Treatment involves a free course of antiviral tablets lasting 8 to 12 weeks, which cures more than 95% of cases."</i><p>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")
Not sure if they edited the article after you read it but this is the 3rd paragraph now:<p>“Taking antiviral tablets for 8 to 12 weeks can cure more than 95% of cases.”
There are vaccines for Hep A and Hep B. None for Hep C yet. Nor Hep V for the <i>True Blood</i> fans. Twinrix is the name of a combined Hep A & B vaccine (2 doses) - your health insurance most likely pays for it.<p>Hep A outbreaks are relatively frequent at restaurants (in my state).<p>Every state in the US has an immunization registry (they're all hosted by WebIZ) so they all look the same and produce the same sort of document. Checking states I've lived in, some of the records go back to 2008. My insurance pays for all vaccines except for "travel vaccines".<p>Shopping list:<p><a href="https://www.fda.gov/vaccines-blood-biologics/vaccines/vaccines-licensed-use-united-states" rel="nofollow">https://www.fda.gov/vaccines-blood-biologics/vaccines/vaccin...</a>
You take antivirals orally. There is no vaccine that I'm aware of. I got Hep C from a blood transfusion in the 80s and waited decades without symptoms for modern antivirals before finally getting treated.
> I got Hep C from a blood transfusion in the 80s...<p>Same here! I had <i>one</i> symptom -intermittent somewhat abnormal liver enzyme results- that was very easy to explain away with the fact that I'm nearly always somewhat dehydrated because I have trouble forcing myself to drink enough water. I had to run into a doc who was in the habit of running the test "just in case" because she had seen a <i>ton</i> of Hep C cases before the culprit was discovered.<p>Honestly, I'm <i>really</i> glad I didn't get diagnosed much earlier than I did... it's my understanding that interferon treatment is really awful to go through and has like a 50% success rate for Hep C infections. When I got diagnosed Harvoni was quite new, but it worked on the strain I had, and there were absolutely no side effects that I noticed. Its list price was <i>shockingly</i> expensive (something like 150k USD) but that's <i>way</i> cheaper than a new liver and -as is often the case with these sorts of things- financial "wizardry" meant that I paid like 5 USD.
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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.
Also politically impossible is that Congress made it illegal for state/federal health plans (Medicaid for poor folks and Medicaid for old folks) to negotiate prices with drug companies. Which is why it can cost $95k for a Hep C treatment in the US. It is my understanding that NHS negotiated a price around £3k for the same treatment.
The Senate? He just issued an executive order overriding all science. It's a total farce at this point.
Care to elaborate?<p>What has RFK Jr specifically said for/against HepC?
I think the OP is extrapolating from the rise in measles cases under RFK Jr’s expert leadership
He has repeatedly stated that there are "no safe vaccines."<p><a href="https://youtu.be/G4vP4GdHhoA?t=293" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/G4vP4GdHhoA?t=293</a><p>> <i>Trump said "vats" of vaccines are pumped into children's bodies.</i><p><a href="https://www.npr.org/2026/08/10/nx-s1-5927313/trump-rfk-jr-vaccines-autism-executive-order" rel="nofollow">https://www.npr.org/2026/08/10/nx-s1-5927313/trump-rfk-jr-va...</a><p>This makes all children turn purple and explode just like Violet Beauregarde.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Yqw_f26SvM" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Yqw_f26SvM</a>
Trump just issued an order reducing childhood vaccines, plus there is a Hep C vaccine which is being ignored by the CDC. Never mind the resurgence of many childhood diseases thanks to RFK jr and Trump.<p>I do not know why some people think the current US regime will follow England with all evidence pointing to doing the exact opposite.
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.<p>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.
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So will it be replaced by Hepatitis Rust for memory safety? (I'm sorry, and I'll see myself out, thanks)
Now everyone is migrating to hepatitis Rust
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.
> 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.<p>So indeed diagnosing the cases is leading directly to deaths prevented.
Elimination doesn't mean there are no incidences of it, it means no <i>new</i> 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.
It's just legalise phrasing, still a good news. Saldy we lost measles eradication status, and tuberculosis might be lost as well soon.
The title shows a lack of understanding. BBC has become really low quality.
What do you mean by this? The article quotes an NHS director backing up the statement in the title.<p>> 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.<p>Seems fairly unambiguous to me
There is a lack of understanding, but it's coming from you not the BBC.<p>There is a difference between elimination and eradication.<p>As usual you fail to understand nuance.
My brain kept reading Erlang and I was pretty confusing
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.
To be fair Erlang is written in Erlang and before that Prolog, so the Erlang community may indeed view C as Hepatitis.
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?<p>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?<p>EDIT: Thanks people, I just asked a question to better understand the terminology, you know ...
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.
Some of the confusion here is from our history. This is my (likely confused) understanding:<p>James VI/I (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_VI_and_I" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_VI_and_I</a>) was king of _both_ England and Scotland and only later did the Union <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Union" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Union</a> combine the two. You might notice I've neglected Wales which was (considered?) part of England.<p>In any case, England is a country, yes. Also the UK is a country.
When I've heard the distinction (often in a historical context), 'nation' is usually meant to mean a set of people in a place with some sense of collective identity or origin, while 'state' is the governing body which has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence within well defined borders. When these overlap the result is a nation-state, but they don't always line up so nearly. Using those definitions England, Wales, and Scotland are nations. Ireland (including northern Ireland) could also be called a nation (though, of course, as should be obvious by the fact that this does not line up with the borders of the state, this is a contentious topic). The United Kingdom is the state (and of course Ireland-minus-northern-ireland is also a state). 'Country' as a term generally doesn't imply either of these (it's just a name for some chunk of land, notionally), though it's often synonymous with the nation-state when the borders all actually line up neatly, as opposed to in the UK.
Here's a venn diagram that may help:<p><a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:British_Isles_Venn_Diagram-en.png" rel="nofollow">https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:British_Isles_Venn_D...</a><p>The green circles are each a single island. The yellow circle are a bunch of islands.
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.<p>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).<p>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.
A lot of powers are devolved away from England to each other country in the UK. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devolution_in_the_United_Kingdom" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devolution_in_the_United_Kingd...</a>
CGP Grey: The United Kingdom Explained (2015) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNu8XDBSn10" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNu8XDBSn10</a>
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.
Wales and Scotland are separate countries to England.
England is a country, and if you're reading this on the BBC they most certainly are using the correct terminology.<p>It is not a sovereign country, but instead is a part of the constituents comprising the UK state.
OK, so now we have the following terms: State, nation, country, sovereign country.<p>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.)
The "Länder" in Bundesländer is plural of Land, which is the same land as in "land of the free" and would be translated to "nation", "land", "country" or "state" depending on context.<p>So in modern English they may be states, but there sure is a lot of overlap between "country" and "state".
"And by 'country' we mean a sovereign state that is a member of the UN in its own right" to quote the famous UK Quiz Show "Pointless".<p><i>Team GB</i> enters the Olympics but as you may have noticed it was <i>England</i> who came Third in the World Cup recently, and likewise <i>England</i> play international rugby, including against Wales and Scotland.
"State" has lots of meanings depending on context, as it can also refer to the highest level of governments for example: State actors or "head of state". In the U.S., the head of state refers to the President, not to governors in individual states, typically.
The UK, crown dependencies and overseas territories compete as Great Britain in the Olympics rather than the UK. Northern Irish folks can compete for Ireland or GB.<p>As an English person I would say that Scotland and Wales are nations and countries; constituent countries of the country that is the UK.
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.<p>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.
England is a country. The UK is a country.<p>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.
No one is confused if you can the UK a country, or if you call England, Wales, or Scotland a country.<p>You might get a tedious person saying something like "actually, Wales is a principality".
I must admit I've never heard NI being called a country... wouldn't be the UK if there wasn't some horrible complication involved.
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.
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.
I'm English and I don't think England or Scotland or Wales are countries. People get confused because of football and rugby. They're nations. The country is the United Kingdom.
England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are constituent countries of the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom is also a country. You can disagree, but you're disagreeing with the government and the international community.
Scotland, Wales, and NI have their own parliaments at least, so from a constitutional perspective one could argue England is not a country but a state, but that is only one narrow definition.
Not a problem, I disagree with the government all the time. Scotland has less sovereignty than US states, it's not a country.