The Ministry of Health and Welfare on Thursday said it plans to extend coverage for oral hepatitis C drugs to everyone covered by the National Health Insurance, with officials saying that plan would eradicate the disease by 2025.
Under the proposed policy, medical coverage for the drugs would be available to all people with hepatitis C, not just those with severe liver fibrosis or cirrhosis, Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中) said.
New oral drugs for hepatitis C have a 97 percent success rate in curing the disease after a 12-week treatment regimen and the ministry in January last year extended medical coverage for their use, Chen said.
However, current NHI guidelines allow public funding for the drugs only when the patient has F3 liver fibrosis or cirrhosis, he said.
After consulting healthcare experts at a meeting earlier in the day, the ministry said that extending coverage unconditionally would help the nation eliminate hepatitis five years before the WHO’s target of 2030, he said.
The proposed changes would increase the share of the NHI budget for hepatitis C treatments to an estimated NT$6.5 billion (US$210.4 million), a 30 percent increase, he said.
The new guidelines would facilitate clearing an estimated 40,000 people of hepatitis C per year and the ministry anticipates that the disease would be eradicated from the 210,000 people who have it within seven years, Chen said.
Before the ministry approves the policy, officials would have to discuss pricing issues with pharmaceutical companies, said Kang Jaw-jou (康照洲), a National Yangming University pharmaceutical sciences professor who chaired the meeting.
The government’s ability to set a price that is acceptable to manufacturers and within the limited NHI budget is crucial to moving the plan forward, Kang said.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the