19 de Mayo de 2002 Día internacional de la lucha contra la hepatitis C

The undersigned, sick by the viral action of the hepatitis C, desire in this Hepatitis World Day, to make arrive at the public opinion and to the Authorities responsible for the public health:

About the conditions that affect us, in order that their spreading will serve to stop the growing expansion of the hepatitis so they will be adopted for who has competence, the conducive measures to obtain the final solution for that disease that bothers us.

The Hepatitis C, that affects more than two hundred million persons around the world, destroys the liver, without hurry but without pause, and its evolution conducts in most cases to suffer cirrhosis and in specific cases degenerates in liver cancer (hepatocarcinoma). The trasplant of liver is the only efficient solution we relay until the present in order to resolve this terminal situation, with all the negative connotations that this ending supposes, and by obvious reasons, is unreachable for all the people who need it.

The spreading of this disease is produced by parenteral way, what implies danger of infection when exist contact with contaminated blood, as can happen when professionals as dentists, chiropodist, hairdressers, manicurist, etc, do not adopt adequate measures of asepsis. Infections cases exists into the public and the private health systems by transfusions blood and/or utilization of hemoderivative for the other diseases treatment. The hepatitis C, known as the "silent illness", is normally diagnose by chance in work medical controls, in blood donations, or in analytic controls made in order to search other pathologies.
Maybe because the relatively recent date of discovery of the virus C (1989) and because the complexity of the hepatic function, not all the health professionals are qualified for the adequate treatment of the disease, and the situation is the reduction of the importance, with all the negative consequences that such attitude can suppose, or the contrary, the advises to the patients behaviour turns them in excluded people in in specific social environments or in their job, producing in some cases total social refusal, which increases the state of depression that the own illness generates and the feeling of solitude in which many of the affected persons live.

To alleviate all these spreading problems we REQUIRE from the Health Authorities:
- Campaigns of diffusion for knowledge and prevention of the Hepatitis C.
- General formation about the Hepatitis disease for the professionals of the primary attention.
- Immediate hepatic trials in case of high transaminasas or any symptoms that can make suspect the existence of the illness.
- In positive case, preferential attention by specialized doctors.
- The trials documentation delivery to the patients, as a generalized practice.
- The immediate application of the treatment: Interferon pegylated + Ribavirina , or any another effective treatment of the disease, with charge to the Health System Budgets.
- Psychological follow-up for the problems that the diseases produced.
- Political recognition of the hepatitis C chronic character, to all the effects, whether in labour as in social area.
- In case of labour contagion into the health area, the disease must be recognized as professional illness.

In the Hepatitis World Day, we want to raise our voices to denounce to Governments and mandatory of all the countries, as well as to the World Health Organization about the lacks that ourselves the patients, in order to achieve the promulgation of norms addressed to resolve all the needs that have remained indicated, all in order to avoid the epidemic profile of this disease.