22 LISTENER JUNE 1 2019
K
eith Richards, David
Bowie, Lou Reed, Brian
May of Queen, Dusty Hill
of ZZ Top, David Crosby,
Gregg Allman, Aerosmith’s
Steven Tyler, Natalie Cole,
Etta James, Marianne Faith-
full, Naomi Judd, Anthony
Kiedis of Red Hot Chili Peppers and Martin
Phillipps of The Chills. What, apart from
making music, do they have
in common?
The answer is that they
feature on the long list of
musicians to have contracted
the hepatitis C virus, most of
them through drug use. (Judd,
who was infected in a needlestick
accident when she worked as a
nurse in the 1980s, is a notable exception.)
All but Richards suffered chronic liver dis-
ease. He later bragged about his “incredible
immune system”, but he was really just in
the lucky minority of people who clear the
virus after the acute phase of infection. Far
from being debilitated, Richards is about to
set off with The Rolling Stones on a 17-date
tour of the US that was delayed earlier in the
year when Mick Jagger had heart surgery.
Crosby received a liver transplant and will
be on immunosuppressant drugs for the rest
of his life. Tyler endured an 11-month course
of interferon, the only available treatment
at the time, an experience so punishing, he
says, that it broke up his marriage. Kiedis,
preposterously, claims to have controlled his
infection with intravenous ozone.
Others weren’t so lucky. Cole died of
kidney and heart problems probably
related to end-stage liver disease. Bowie and
Reed both died of liver cancer, Reed onlymonths after a liver transplant.
Phillipps, as the new film The Chills: The
Triumph & Tragedy of Martin Phillipps starkly
tells, might have been dead now, too. But
his story is different. His life and his liver
were saved by a new generation of direct-
acting antiviral drugs.
The last and most powerful of these,
Maviret, was funded by Pharmac this year
for all New Zealanders with the virus. Theeight-week course of treatment with Maviret
carries no significant side effects and is so
effective that experts are now beginning
to talk about eliminating hepatitis C alto-
gether. But what will that take?Infectious diseases are not easy to eradi-
cate. Humanity has managed it only twice.
In 1979, the World Health Organisation
announced that smallpox had been driven
from the planet. Twenty-two years later, rin-
derpest, a viral plague that had been killing
cattle since the Stone Age, was also declared
dead by the United Nations.
Eradication has never been done without
a vaccine, and it takes generations. Smallpox
wasn’t banished until nearly
200 years after Dr Edward
Jenner first produced a small-
pox vaccine. And, as recent
headlines have reminded us,
it’s easy to go backwards –
measles, which mutated about
a thousand years ago from the
rinderpest virus, is still with us.
Four years ago, Dr Ed Gane, the coun-
try’s leading liver specialist, told me about
a study in Melbourne in which doctors
treating injecting drug users with new
direct-acting antiviral drugs had not only
cured those patients of the liver virus hepati-
tis C, but also “been able to turn off all new
infections in Victoria”.
What that showed, said Gane in 2016, “is
that we don’t just treat the sickest people
on the waiting list, we have to treat every-
one. And if you do that, including those
people who are still injecting, it’s what we
call treatment as prevention – and we will
actually eliminate hepatitis C without a vac-
cine within the next 15-20 years.”
Months later, the Australian Government
put up the funding that seemed to make
that dream real, committing $200 million a
year to the purchase of antivirals to cure the
quarter of a million Australians with hep C.
On March 1, 2016, the new drugs – whichTHE BUTTERFLY
CHALLENGE
With a simple logo and message, hepatitis C campaigners are
hoping to reach the thousands of Kiwis who still don’t know they
have the deadly virus – or that there’s a miracle cure. by RUSSELL BROWN
HEPATITIS C CURE
Natalie Cole died of
kidney and heartproblems probably
related to end-stage liver
disease. Bowie and Reedboth died of liver cancer.
The butterfly logo that
symbolises the battle
against hep C.