What is Ribavirin and how does it help in Hepatitis C treatment?

Hepatitis C is a contagious disease that attacks a person’s liver. It can occur in a relatively mild form causing illness for some weeks. In its more severe chronic form, it can damage a person’s liver for life leading to the need for a liver transplant. Hep C spreads mostly through contact with the blood of a person having the disease. The virus causes illness within six months of gaining entrance to a person’s body. The acute form of the illness can become chronic if the virus lives on in the host body. This can lead to liver cirrhosis or cancer. Luckily, there exist drugs like Ribavirin for Hepatitis C treatment.

How it occurs

Hepatitis C can occur if a person uses a syringe or needle already used by a Hepatitis C infected person to inject something in the body. This can happen in a laboratory or other health care facility also. Items used for personal hygiene, like toothbrushes and razors, both of which, can cause a slight bit of bleeding when used, can also be carriers of the Hep C virus. In some cases, sexual contact with an infected person increases the risk of contracting the infection. Piercing and tattooing practices which are not regulated can also cause the spread of the illness, though rarely.

Goal of treatments

Treatments like Ribavirin for Hepatitis C aim to remove the virus RNA from the patient’s body. They use a sustained virologic response to achieve this. Before any treatment is undertaken, it is tested extensively on all kinds of patients including ones who have never received any treatment, ones who have received treatment in the past but suffered a relapse, and those who have achieved a partial victory over Hep C with other treatments.

How Ribavirin acts

For the Hepatitis C virus (HCV) to replicate, it needs certain conditions which Ribavirin aims to destroy. This includes inhibiting a required protein enzyme. Ribavirin for Hepatitis C treatment also directly inhibits the HCV from replicating. Also, it creates conditions so that the virus which is duplicating rapidly is driven beyond a frontier to error. It also stimulates the body’s immune response.

Success of Ribavirin

Ribavirin has been used in the past to treat respiratory diseases. It met with FDA approval for Hep C treatment in 2011 and has been used ever since. Patients with a high density of the Hepatitis C virus including, but not limited to, genotypes 2 and 3, respond well to a combination treatment of Ribavirin and another drug. This means hope for the 3% of the world’s population or more than 100 million people who suffer from this terrible disease. Most of these people are located in developing countries from Asia and Africa. For this reason, the medical community has started a campaign to prevent as well as treat Hepatitis C occurrences before they take a chronic form.

With existing treatments and other constantly being discovered, there is hope for millions. Though there is concern from existing Hepatitis C cases and their conversion to the chronic form, the fact is that the number of new patients contracting the disease is dropping.