Interesting that it's just England (and not Scotland, Wales, or NI). I realize they all have independent NHSs, but still would assume a program like this would rolled out across all the constituent countries.
Splitting hairs, but the public health bodies are separate from the National Health Services (so there exists Public Health England _and_ NHS England). Public health is slightly different to healthcare, but of course they work together.
Oddly, Public Health Scotland is part of NHS Scotland; but Public Health England is not part of NHS England, it's a parallel department.
I wouldn't have assumed this really because really the whole point of devolution is that they get to choose what to prioritise, so perhaps the other nations choose to do something they consider to be more pressing for their populations.
I don't know if borders matter much in this case. It's approximately just as easy to travel to England from many other countries as it is to travel to England from the rest of the UK.
Given that Great Britain is an island, it is still much easier to drive down the M6/A74(M) or take a hike around the Welsh borders than say, take a flight or swim.
It can be quicker to reach southern England from continental Europe than from Northern Ireland or many parts of Scotland. Or the Isle of Man (which I'm well aware is a Crown Dependency.)
The UK consists of a number of islands. We have hundreds in Scotland with tens of thousands of people living on the other ones. England and Wales have significant ones such as the Isle of Wight, Ynys Môn and Lindisfarne. The IOW has at least 100,000 on it.
It is a lot harder to travel into England from outside of the United Kingdom than it is to travel from England to Scotland or Wales. For one, I do not need a passport to get on a train to Scotland. Nor do I need a visa.
But you most likely have a passport, and most (western/european) countries have "automatic" visas to the UK, so for the most part, training from London to Edinburgh isn't much easier than Paris to London. Sure there is no passport control, but UK passport control is typically just scan your passport's chip and look at a camera.
I work with people who actively chose to go to conference in Berlin instead of the UK due to visa issues. The passport control is a real issue one cannot just handwave away.
It's quicker to travel to London from Paris and Calais than it is from parts of Scotland. Even though much of the UK's infrastructure acts as a feeder into London. No, we don't need passports but some people in London seem to have the idea that it's just down the road from us, which it isn't.
If you want to get to Glasgow from Campbelltown it can take you as long as three hours for example, and that's before you hit the motorway. Trying to get from west Sutherland to London is worse. Trying to get there from the Hebrides or Northen Isles even more so.
The borders between Scotland, England, and Wales are effectively like state borders in the US. Unless you see a street sign, you wouldn't know you crossed it.
NI is physically on a different island, so requires a boat or plane ride.
And all of the UK (ignoring the territories and ex-colonies) is on islands. And require a valid passport, passing through customs/immigration checks, and either a plane, boat, or train ride.
Most of the Scottish border is fairly physically obvious, unlike Wales (although the Severn bridge is).
Tens of thousands of people live on islands other than Britain and Ireland. Much of Scotland is not even considered UK mainland by delivery firms, even major places such as Perth.
What? Perth isn't considered part of the mainland? How is that possible? My family is from Perthshire (Blairgowrie) and I've visited a bunch. It's definitely part of the island!!!
I can understand Lewis and Harris or the Shetlands (they're separate islands without bridge links), but Perth doesn't make much sense. And I would have assumed Skye was considered "mainland" as well, at least now that there's a bridge.
Some delivery firms don't consider substantial parts of mainland Scotland to be "UK mainland". They charge extra. That has been the case for some business deliveries and even flower deliveries for a while.
There was a controversy about Perth in this regard a while back. I'm not even talking about Blairgowrie or Dunkeld or outlying places but someone trying to get deliveries to an industrial estate within the city of Perth itself.
The way things are going, maybe only the Central Belt will get preferential delivery fees.
Some of them don't consider Perth to be part of mainland UK for delivery purposes. It is one of the major arguments against private parcel delivery... They'll either end up with poste restante in major cities or stop delivering to rural areas entirely. (Perth is one of the bigger places in Scotland after the four major cities and not even in the Highlands.)
Sure but there's no real need for it in this case, or in the NHS in general I would say. It's probably just devolved because Scotland and Wales want everything to be devolved even if it makes no sense.
Each nation has different social and health issues, each nation makes its own plan.
All four nations NHSes work with a single charity, the Hep C Trust.
They're all following the WHO targets for elimination -- you're hearing about this now soon after World Hepatitis Day (July 28th, as conceived of by the WHO).
So it is less "England has a program and the others don't" and more that each NHS is pursuing the same WHO goal independently, with different reporting and timelines
Literally nothing in the article points to it being eliminated, only reaching a target of diagnosing 90% of the cases, which doesn't do anything to eliminate it when a large number of cases comes from drug users which are unlikely to care very much about it.
> The target of treating 80% of all known cases has already been met, and deaths from the virus have fallen by 36% in the last decade, just short of what is needed by 2030. Taking antiviral tablets for 8 to 12 weeks can cure more than 95% of cases.
So indeed diagnosing the cases is leading directly to deaths prevented.
> So indeed diagnosing the cases is leading directly to deaths prevented.
This is not what the title claims. The title claims that hepatitis C is to be eliminated, aka 0%. This is not possible; anyone with a basic 101 virology knows why. BBC lies here via the title.
Elimination doesn't mean there are no incidences of it, it means no new cases diagnosed in England. This is a result of reducing the cases so much that the chance of catching it drops to virtually zero. Drug users have a range of cleaner alternatives today than 10 years ago so is less of an issue but also if very few people have it, the chance of a drug user sharing a needle with someone who has becomes very small indeed.
Not in this context, no. It means the same thing as being cured of Hep C means... there's a little bit still lingering around, but the systems that keep it under control mean that it doesn't cause any problems. The world and one's body are environments that are way too large to get rid of 100% of something without utterly obliterating them.
> That virus existed way before drug users did.
I'm skeptical. Living things have been drug users for approximately forever.
Anyway, a fun fact that I learned when I was getting my Hep C diagnosis and treatment is that the three most common ways to get it are
1) Be an IV drug user who's not extremely careful about their needles
2) Share your toothbrush with someone else
3) Have had a blood transfusion prior to ~1992, when they started screening the blood supply for Hep C
It turns out that -for the sex-havers that aren't into blood play- sex is one of the least effective methods of Hepatitis transmission.
Nah we are good - We have our problems (including our own version of your guy but he hasn't won yet and is currently running against a man with a bin on his head) but on the whole, nah we are good.
Well, then, we can offer you measles, instead. How's that? We're also working on bringing back polio and smallpox. Think of it as our contribution to FREEDOM!
Farage isn't quite the same and of course the situation is rather different.
The three jobs are divided up differently, though still between too few people. You have a Figurehead, the Head of State, which here is King Charles and in the US is Donald Trump. That's the part Trump most likes, you get free gold stuff, you're allowed to do whatever you please, everybody is supposed to suck up to you, hooray. Farage would not get that job.
Next you've got Executive leader. Trump doesn't enjoy this as much. People keep trying to blame him for the fact he's bad at it. He appointed people he saw on TV to run things, how is it his fault they're not brilliant? This would be half of Farage's job as Prime Minister and he likes being asked to account for his incompetence even less than Trump.
Finally Head of the Legislature, in the US this isn't Trump's job, Mike Johnson is in the House and John Thune in the Senate. Farage would get this job in full as the Prime Minister. Even before he resigned he was rarely actually in Westminster, it's boring and you need to be good at actual politics, so of course he's not there, he gets paid more to be somewhere else.
I also don't think Nigel can put together the numbers. Trump has Mike and John to try to make the numbers work, and Farage wouldn't have that. "My way or the highway" is what Farage would say, and that doesn't make the numbers work. That's how you lose a Confidence motion and you're back on your arse in six weeks.
[Edited to correct the Senate leader, mistake pointed out by ragnese below]
Good explanation. Just one correction: John Thune is the Senate majority leader (so, the "head" of the Senate). Steve Scalise is in the House and he's the head of the Republican party in the House, whereas Mike Johnson (who is also a Republican) is the House majority leader (so the head of the whole House, not just his party).
So, it's Mike Johnson for the House and John Thune for the Senate.
Just to understand this: When someone says "country England", do they mean "country" like in "nation", considering England a separate nation, or is it a lapse and they mean UK? Is England usually referred to as a country, or just part of a country?
I usually think of a country as equal to a nation, and as far as I know, Wales and Scotland have not split off yet? Is the term "country" not actually that sharply defined?
EDIT: Thanks people, I just asked a question to better understand the terminology, you know ...
OK, so now we have the following terms: State, nation, country, sovereign country.
For example in Germany one would say there are 16 states, but one wouldn't say that there are 16 countries. Never heard anyone claim that. So state seems to be different from country, at least here. Would people in the UK say that Scotland or Wales are "nations"? Or is at least that term very clearly only for units that could participate under a flag in lets say the olympics? (I assume here, that Scotland and Wales are not separately competing, but are under UK flag.)
"And by 'country' we mean a sovereign state that is a member of the UN in its own right" to quote the famous UK Quiz Show "Pointless".
Team GB enters the Olympics but as you may have noticed it was England who came Third in the World Cup recently, and likewise England play international rugby, including against Wales and Scotland.
The UK, crown dependencies and overseas territories compete as Great Britain in the Olympics rather than the UK. Northern Irish folks can compete for Ireland or GB.
As an English person I would say that Scotland and Wales are nations and countries; constituent countries of the country that is the UK.
Until today I didn't consider, that countries can be compound/consist of countries. That countries can be recursive. I always thought, that any lower level would be called differently. TIL.
"State" has lots of meanings depending on context, as it can also refer to the highest level of governments for example: State actors or "head of state". In the U.S., the head of state refers to the President, not to governors in individual states, typically.
The "Länder" in Bundesländer is plural of Land, which is the same land as in "land of the free" and would be translated to "nation", "land", "country" or "state" depending on context.
So in modern English they may be states, but there sure is a lot of overlap between "country" and "state".
People in the UK would refer to England as a country and most people would actually be confused if you referred to the UK as a country, even though it technically is. People in England don’t really think of the UK as anything other than “the UK”. People from Scotland, Wales, and Ireland have more nuanced takes.
I'm English and I don't think England or Scotland or Wales are countries. People get confused because of football and rugby. They're nations. The country is the United Kingdom.
England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are constituent countries of the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom is also a country. You can disagree, but you're disagreeing with the government and the international community.
The UK seems fairly relaxed about constituent parts leaving (Scotland was given a referendum, NI has option to leave if they want) - which I don't believe applies to US states?
Relaxed is not the word at all. Northern Ireland is a powderkeg and the UK government has known that for decades.
The Scottish referendum did not use neutral international observers, and had extremely biased coverage by state media. The BBC itself even tried to stir up forms of violent unionism. (Look up the so called "passionate Highlander", a drunken loyalist type who talked about defending the union to the death "in the name of Jesus Christ".)
Scotland, Wales, and NI have their own parliaments at least, so from a constitutional perspective one could argue England is not a country but a state, but that is only one narrow definition.
In this case it's health related and each of the countries in the UK have their own National Health Services (or Health and Social Care in NI). It's not a lapse here.
I don't understand. It's an article about England. They only have information to hand about England, from the authority tasked with dealing with health in England.
If I read an article from them about crime in London, quoting the Metropolitan Police, I don't immediately think that they don't care about, say, the West Midlands.
The mistake they made is to directly say "one of the first countries" in the article title, which immediately implies a comparison to foreign countries. But clearly, since they're talking about England, which is a subdivision of the UK, why aren't they comparing this achievement to equivalent subdivisions, such as states or provinces, in other nations instead? This isn't a direct comparison (which might also make it an unfair one), so it makes sense why people would misread them by assuming that this is an error and that they meant to compare equivalents.
The BBC do use a consistent naming scheme, you're just not understanding the scheme. Scotland has their own devolved NHS, and track their own health statistics. Scotland not being mentioned is because the Hepatitis C Trust were talking about England's Hep C numbers, it wasn't an intentional slight on Scotland.
Confusingly the proper term for England, Scotland, Wales, and NI is country individually, the UK is a country of countries. They should probably be called states but they never have been, I'd pretty much always assume when someone says England to become the first country... that they mean England exclusively.
The bit that gets me is that people often refer to the UK but actually mean GB or vice versa.
England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland are constituent countries in a larger country called the United Kingdom. When dealing with international affairs, you typically want to be talking about the UK (unless the subject is sport), as that is the sovereign state. But for domestic affairs, it’s often split in ways that are confusing if you don’t understand various bits of history stretching back about a thousand years.
For instance, England and Wales share a legal system, but Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own. There’s bunch of special things about Northern Ireland and its relation to Ireland. And all of the constituent countries have their own parliament / assembly except for England (the parliament in London is for the whole of the UK where MPs for all constituent countries can vote).
In this particular case, the constituent countries have their own health systems, so it’s normally England we would be talking about, not the UK.
Yeah England is a country. Like what else do we have the name “England” for? We talk a lot more about England than some non-country geography like Anatolia (Asian Turkey). For example there was no UK in the World Cup, but England made it quite far.
If that’s a bit eccentric, well this is the same place that refers to Europe as a different place even though France borders the UK by automobile road.
When I've heard the distinction (often in a historical context), 'nation' is usually meant to mean a set of people in a place with some sense of collective identity or origin, while 'state' is the governing body which has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence within well defined borders. When these overlap the result is a nation-state, but they don't always line up so nearly. Using those definitions England, Wales, and Scotland are nations. Ireland (including northern Ireland) could also be called a nation (though, of course, as should be obvious by the fact that this does not line up with the borders of the state, this is a contentious topic). The United Kingdom is the state (and of course Ireland-minus-northern-ireland is also a state). 'Country' as a term generally doesn't imply either of these (it's just a name for some chunk of land, notionally), though it's often synonymous with the nation-state when the borders all actually line up neatly, as opposed to in the UK.
What do you mean by this? The article quotes an NHS director backing up the statement in the title.
> England is now leading the world in the mission to eliminate this disease and on course to beat the WHO's 2030 target, but we are determined to keep up the momentum and finish the job.
> "Treatment involves a free course of antiviral tablets lasting 8 to 12 weeks, which cures more than 95% of cases."
must be nice to have a government that actually cares about its citizens health, we're still waiting DECADES for that Republican health care plan (other than "just die quietly")
You take antivirals orally. There is no vaccine that I'm aware of. I got Hep C from a blood transfusion in the 80s and waited decades without symptoms for modern antivirals before finally getting treated.
> I got Hep C from a blood transfusion in the 80s...
Same here! I had one symptom -intermittent somewhat abnormal liver enzyme results- that was very easy to explain away with the fact that I'm nearly always somewhat dehydrated because I have trouble forcing myself to drink enough water. I had to run into a doc who was in the habit of running the test "just in case" because she had seen a ton of Hep C cases before the culprit was discovered.
Honestly, I'm really glad I didn't get diagnosed much earlier than I did... it's my understanding that interferon treatment is really awful to go through and has like a 50% success rate for Hep C infections. When I got diagnosed Harvoni was quite new, but it worked on the strain I had, and there were absolutely no side effects that I noticed. Its list price was shockingly expensive (something like 150k USD) but that's way cheaper than a new liver and -as is often the case with these sorts of things- financial "wizardry" meant that I paid like 5 USD.
I was young (got the transfusion just after I was born) but I understand that my parents got notified of the possible/likely infection based on that batch of blood leading to other infected patients, then I got tested and was positive. There was a class action lawsuit that paid for the otherwise very expensive treatment (I was treated 10 years ago). My doctor given my lack of symptoms for many years discouraged the interferon treatment anticipating that better drugs would be coming. He was right and I was treated without side effects before I ever had symptoms.
There are vaccines for Hep A and Hep B. None for Hep C yet. Nor Hep V for the True Blood fans. Twinrix is the name of a combined Hep A & B vaccine (2 doses) - your health insurance most likely pays for it.
Hep A outbreaks are relatively frequent at restaurants (in my state).
Every state in the US has an immunization registry (they're all hosted by WebIZ) so they all look the same and produce the same sort of document. Checking states I've lived in, some of the records go back to 2008. My insurance pays for all vaccines except for "travel vaccines".
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Oddly, Public Health Scotland is part of NHS Scotland; but Public Health England is not part of NHS England, it's a parallel department.
I'm British by birth (well, UAE, but they don't do jus soli), but been in the US since kindergarten and naturalized since college.
The UK consists of a number of islands. We have hundreds in Scotland with tens of thousands of people living on the other ones. England and Wales have significant ones such as the Isle of Wight, Ynys Môn and Lindisfarne. The IOW has at least 100,000 on it.
If they emigrated to the EU and want to travel to the UK then I could see that.
If you want to get to Glasgow from Campbelltown it can take you as long as three hours for example, and that's before you hit the motorway. Trying to get from west Sutherland to London is worse. Trying to get there from the Hebrides or Northen Isles even more so.
The borders between Scotland, England, and Wales are effectively like state borders in the US. Unless you see a street sign, you wouldn't know you crossed it.
NI is physically on a different island, so requires a boat or plane ride.
And all of the UK (ignoring the territories and ex-colonies) is on islands. And require a valid passport, passing through customs/immigration checks, and either a plane, boat, or train ride.
Tens of thousands of people live on islands other than Britain and Ireland. Much of Scotland is not even considered UK mainland by delivery firms, even major places such as Perth.
I can understand Lewis and Harris or the Shetlands (they're separate islands without bridge links), but Perth doesn't make much sense. And I would have assumed Skye was considered "mainland" as well, at least now that there's a bridge.
There was a controversy about Perth in this regard a while back. I'm not even talking about Blairgowrie or Dunkeld or outlying places but someone trying to get deliveries to an industrial estate within the city of Perth itself.
The way things are going, maybe only the Central Belt will get preferential delivery fees.
All four nations NHSes work with a single charity, the Hep C Trust.
They're all following the WHO targets for elimination -- you're hearing about this now soon after World Hepatitis Day (July 28th, as conceived of by the WHO).
https://www.hepctrust.org.uk/blog/2026/07/four-nations-on-th...
As for progress:
- July 2026: Wales doesn't have percentage-of-population counts but here's its latest report: https://phw.nhs.wales/reports/trends-in-the-prevention-diagn...
- November 2025: Scotland believes it has identified and is treating 85% of chronic sufferers: https://publichealthscotland.scot/publications/surveillance-...
- January 2021: Northern Ireland doesn't publish stats, but has a 2021-2025 plan (there's no 2026- plan issued as far as I know) https://www.health-ni.gov.uk/publications/northern-ireland-h...
So indeed diagnosing the cases is leading directly to deaths prevented.
This is not what the title claims. The title claims that hepatitis C is to be eliminated, aka 0%. This is not possible; anyone with a basic 101 virology knows why. BBC lies here via the title.
> Drug users have a range of
The title does not even mention drug users.
The title refers to the hepatitis C virus. That virus existed way before drug users did.
Not in this context, no. It means the same thing as being cured of Hep C means... there's a little bit still lingering around, but the systems that keep it under control mean that it doesn't cause any problems. The world and one's body are environments that are way too large to get rid of 100% of something without utterly obliterating them.
> That virus existed way before drug users did.
I'm skeptical. Living things have been drug users for approximately forever.
Anyway, a fun fact that I learned when I was getting my Hep C diagnosis and treatment is that the three most common ways to get it are
1) Be an IV drug user who's not extremely careful about their needles
2) Share your toothbrush with someone else
3) Have had a blood transfusion prior to ~1992, when they started screening the blood supply for Hep C
It turns out that -for the sex-havers that aren't into blood play- sex is one of the least effective methods of Hepatitis transmission.
The three jobs are divided up differently, though still between too few people. You have a Figurehead, the Head of State, which here is King Charles and in the US is Donald Trump. That's the part Trump most likes, you get free gold stuff, you're allowed to do whatever you please, everybody is supposed to suck up to you, hooray. Farage would not get that job.
Next you've got Executive leader. Trump doesn't enjoy this as much. People keep trying to blame him for the fact he's bad at it. He appointed people he saw on TV to run things, how is it his fault they're not brilliant? This would be half of Farage's job as Prime Minister and he likes being asked to account for his incompetence even less than Trump.
Finally Head of the Legislature, in the US this isn't Trump's job, Mike Johnson is in the House and John Thune in the Senate. Farage would get this job in full as the Prime Minister. Even before he resigned he was rarely actually in Westminster, it's boring and you need to be good at actual politics, so of course he's not there, he gets paid more to be somewhere else.
I also don't think Nigel can put together the numbers. Trump has Mike and John to try to make the numbers work, and Farage wouldn't have that. "My way or the highway" is what Farage would say, and that doesn't make the numbers work. That's how you lose a Confidence motion and you're back on your arse in six weeks.
[Edited to correct the Senate leader, mistake pointed out by ragnese below]
So, it's Mike Johnson for the House and John Thune for the Senate.
I usually think of a country as equal to a nation, and as far as I know, Wales and Scotland have not split off yet? Is the term "country" not actually that sharply defined?
EDIT: Thanks people, I just asked a question to better understand the terminology, you know ...
It is not a sovereign country, but instead is a part of the constituents comprising the UK state.
For example in Germany one would say there are 16 states, but one wouldn't say that there are 16 countries. Never heard anyone claim that. So state seems to be different from country, at least here. Would people in the UK say that Scotland or Wales are "nations"? Or is at least that term very clearly only for units that could participate under a flag in lets say the olympics? (I assume here, that Scotland and Wales are not separately competing, but are under UK flag.)
Team GB enters the Olympics but as you may have noticed it was England who came Third in the World Cup recently, and likewise England play international rugby, including against Wales and Scotland.
Except when they play as part of the British & Irish Lions!
As an English person I would say that Scotland and Wales are nations and countries; constituent countries of the country that is the UK.
So in modern English they may be states, but there sure is a lot of overlap between "country" and "state".
People in the UK would refer to England as a country and most people would actually be confused if you referred to the UK as a country, even though it technically is. People in England don’t really think of the UK as anything other than “the UK”. People from Scotland, Wales, and Ireland have more nuanced takes.
You might get a tedious person saying something like "actually, Wales is a principality".
It's like if you put four boxes in a box, it's not too confusing that the outer box is still a box.
The NI thing is different, involving a peace treaty between the UK and Ireland.
The Scottish referendum did not use neutral international observers, and had extremely biased coverage by state media. The BBC itself even tried to stir up forms of violent unionism. (Look up the so called "passionate Highlander", a drunken loyalist type who talked about defending the union to the death "in the name of Jesus Christ".)
Guess only England was meant. That would insinuate they don't care about scotland though.
If I read an article from them about crime in London, quoting the Metropolitan Police, I don't immediately think that they don't care about, say, the West Midlands.
The bit that gets me is that people often refer to the UK but actually mean GB or vice versa.
James VI/I (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_VI_and_I) was king of _both_ England and Scotland and only later did the Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Union combine the two. You might notice I've neglected Wales which was (considered?) part of England.
In any case, England is a country, yes. Also the UK is a country.
For instance, England and Wales share a legal system, but Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own. There’s bunch of special things about Northern Ireland and its relation to Ireland. And all of the constituent countries have their own parliament / assembly except for England (the parliament in London is for the whole of the UK where MPs for all constituent countries can vote).
In this particular case, the constituent countries have their own health systems, so it’s normally England we would be talking about, not the UK.
If that’s a bit eccentric, well this is the same place that refers to Europe as a different place even though France borders the UK by automobile road.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:British_Isles_Venn_D...
The green circles are each a single island. The yellow circle are a bunch of islands.
> England is now leading the world in the mission to eliminate this disease and on course to beat the WHO's 2030 target, but we are determined to keep up the momentum and finish the job.
Seems fairly unambiguous to me
There is a difference between elimination and eradication.
As usual you fail to understand nuance.
If it requires a vaccine you can be sure HEP C will be kept alive and well via MAHA in the US
okay here is a much better article
* https://www.england.nhs.uk/2026/08/100000-people-receive-tre...
> "Treatment involves a free course of antiviral tablets lasting 8 to 12 weeks, which cures more than 95% of cases."
must be nice to have a government that actually cares about its citizens health, we're still waiting DECADES for that Republican health care plan (other than "just die quietly")
“Taking antiviral tablets for 8 to 12 weeks can cure more than 95% of cases.”
Same here! I had one symptom -intermittent somewhat abnormal liver enzyme results- that was very easy to explain away with the fact that I'm nearly always somewhat dehydrated because I have trouble forcing myself to drink enough water. I had to run into a doc who was in the habit of running the test "just in case" because she had seen a ton of Hep C cases before the culprit was discovered.
Honestly, I'm really glad I didn't get diagnosed much earlier than I did... it's my understanding that interferon treatment is really awful to go through and has like a 50% success rate for Hep C infections. When I got diagnosed Harvoni was quite new, but it worked on the strain I had, and there were absolutely no side effects that I noticed. Its list price was shockingly expensive (something like 150k USD) but that's way cheaper than a new liver and -as is often the case with these sorts of things- financial "wizardry" meant that I paid like 5 USD.
Hep A outbreaks are relatively frequent at restaurants (in my state).
Every state in the US has an immunization registry (they're all hosted by WebIZ) so they all look the same and produce the same sort of document. Checking states I've lived in, some of the records go back to 2008. My insurance pays for all vaccines except for "travel vaccines".
Shopping list:
https://www.fda.gov/vaccines-blood-biologics/vaccines/vaccin...