The Doctor Molina Orosa Hospital, in Lanzarote, attached to the Ministry of Health of the Government of the Canary Islands, through the head of the Digestive Section, Rubén Berenguer, and in coordination with the doctor of the Lanzarote prison, Miguel Ángel Ortega, has managed to eliminate Hepatitis C from the prison after detecting and treating 15 inmates during the last year.
The initiative, launched with the collaboration of the Island's Health Services Management, is developed under a Public Health approach and tries to end the prevalence of the hepatitis C virus (HCV) among the prison population.
Within the framework of this project, when inmates enter the prison, a complete analysis with serology is done and sent to the hospital to determine if they have the disease, and if it is positive, a more specific test, fibroscan, is performed to diagnose the degree of liver involvement due to the disease.
For his part, Rubén Berenguer makes a report of each patient and prescribes the treatment, which the Ministry of the Interior provides to the inmate. According to the specialist, "the fact that it is a directly observed treatment guarantees the intake of the necessary doses and allows a more effective treatment. In this way, 15 patients have been treated and cured, and we are currently still in contact with the prison to detect and treat new cases that may appear."
In this sense, Dr. Berenguer expresses his satisfaction with the results of the project since "we have managed to detect and diagnose patients and treat them until we achieve the elimination of the disease in the prison because we have very effective direct-acting antiviral treatments with hardly any adverse effects that have shown great effectiveness in curing this disease. And we avoid possible new infections." It should be noted that this initiative is carried out voluntarily and altruistically by the Head of the Digestive Service of the Hospital.
After the experience in the Tahiche prison, the specialist has decided to transfer this project to the Drug Addiction Care Center dependent on the Island Council. With the support of the Lanzarote Health Services Management and together with the CAD detection and treatment team. In this case, we will work along the same lines in patients with a higher risk of suffering from this infection, such as methadone users. First, a systematic study of the center's users will be carried out and, if diagnosed, they will be treated accordingly.
The Lanzarote doctor's project is in line with the WHO's objective of eliminating HCV by 2030.
