I am glad they’re screening for it. I was born to someone who had the virus, but didn’t know I had Hep C myself until I submitted myself to an exceptionally thorough STI testing panel. I say exceptional, because the standard ones I’d done throughout college and early adulthood do not happen to include that particular test. So I feel a bit lucky to have been able to get diagnosed and treated in my mid-20s, before the disease could do much damage.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Steve Scalise 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 Steve 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.
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.
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!
My reading of the article was aggressive response by single payer healthcare (i.e. NHS) is responsible so that would be almost impossible politically in USA as long as senate exists on top of non scientific medical authorities.
That's true, I was recollecting when we had somewhat ordinary politics in USA and Affordable Care Act passed when Democrats had majority in Senate but making it single payer was stopped by purported Democrat Joe Leiberman.
Honestly, Mehmet Oz deserves more of the blame here. He and the other people who are fighting to make healthcare expensive and inaccessible create situations where people aren't being diagnosed and cured of Hep C, which leaves them passing the infection to others through sexual contact, sharing needles, etc.
RFK Jr. is an anti-vax crackpot, but Hep C isn't vaccine-preventable. On the other hand, we can absolutely blame RFK Jr. for our rising Hep A, B, and D rates.
> "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")
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.
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.
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
I am glad they’re screening for it. I was born to someone who had the virus, but didn’t know I had Hep C myself until I submitted myself to an exceptionally thorough STI testing panel. I say exceptional, because the standard ones I’d done throughout college and early adulthood do not happen to include that particular test. So I feel a bit lucky to have been able to get diagnosed and treated in my mid-20s, before the disease could do much damage.
That's odd. I just looked at what I thought was a pretty standard piss and blood STI test results of my own, and it covered:
- Syphilis
- Hep B
- Hep C
- HIV 1 and 2 and P24
- Chlamydia
- Gonorrhoea
I forgot to mention my experience was in the northeastern USA in the 2000s-2010s. I’m happy you got a better standard of care than I did!
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.
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).
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...
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.
Yeah... but there aren't any borders really.
Indeed but there are still different decision makers and sets of voters electing them.
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.
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.
LOL, no that's simply not true.
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.
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.
What? No it's not just as easy, especially since Brexit now there are real border issues compared to driving down the road.
Each country also has their own Public Health bodies, so pretty much everything related to health is devolved
Yes, that's what I said - each is named "NHS [country]" (National Health Service [England | Scotland | etc]).
Good for you. We get explosive diarrhea as the prize in the States. Wanna trade?
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.
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 Steve Scalise 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 Steve 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.
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.
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!
We eliminated TB too. Then it came back.
So will it be replaced by Hepatitis Rust for memory safety? (I'm sorry, and I'll see myself out, thanks)
Share unsafe needles, fearlessly! And concurrently!
Take your upvote...not happy about it....but here
Good news for England.
Thanks to RFKjr and friends, we know what country will be one of the last to do so. Or even worse, the US could end up being a reservoir for HepC.
My reading of the article was aggressive response by single payer healthcare (i.e. NHS) is responsible so that would be almost impossible politically in USA as long as senate exists on top of non scientific medical authorities.
The Senate? He just issued an executive order overriding all science. It's a total farce at this point.
That's true, I was recollecting when we had somewhat ordinary politics in USA and Affordable Care Act passed when Democrats had majority in Senate but making it single payer was stopped by purported Democrat Joe Leiberman.
Care to elaborate?
What has RFK Jr specifically said for/against HepC?
I think the OP is extrapolating from the rise in measles cases under RFK Jr’s expert leadership
Let OP explain xirself.
Honestly, Mehmet Oz deserves more of the blame here. He and the other people who are fighting to make healthcare expensive and inaccessible create situations where people aren't being diagnosed and cured of Hep C, which leaves them passing the infection to others through sexual contact, sharing needles, etc.
RFK Jr. is an anti-vax crackpot, but Hep C isn't vaccine-preventable. On the other hand, we can absolutely blame RFK Jr. for our rising Hep A, B, and D rates.
How can there not be a single sentence in that article HOW IS IT TREATED
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")
Not sure if they edited the article after you read it but this is the 3rd paragraph now:
“Taking antiviral tablets for 8 to 12 weeks can cure more than 95% of cases.”
Now everyone is migrating to hepatitis Rust
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.
You seem to think there is some kind of conspiracy at play. The BBC is simply using the terminology used by the professionals who deal with this.
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.
Elimination means 0%. If BBC wants to convey something else, they should use other statements. The title insinuates this.
> 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.
It's just legalise phrasing, still a good news. Saldy we lost measles eradication status, and tuberculosis might be lost as well soon.
The title shows a lack of understanding. BBC has become really low quality.
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.
Seems fairly unambiguous to me
My brain kept reading Erlang and I was pretty confusing
This is actually a good idea for a HN dataset toy: replace all plausibly confusable words in HN headlines with the names of programming languages.
To be fair Erlang is written in Erlang and before that Prolog, so the Erlang community may indeed view C as Hepatitis.
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 ...
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.
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 kind of assumed that they actually meant UK. It's indeed confusing. I'd wish the BBC would use a consistent naming scheme.
Guess only England was meant. That would insinuate they don't care about scotland though.
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.
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.
Some of the confusion here is from our history. This is my (likely confused) understanding:
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.
CGP Grey: The United Kingdom Explained (2015) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNu8XDBSn10
A lot of powers are devolved away from England to each other country in the UK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devolution_in_the_United_Kingd...
England is a country. The UK is a country.
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.
Not a problem, I disagree with the government all the time. Scotland has less sovereignty than US states.
No one is confused if you can the UK a country, or if you call England, Wales, or Scotland a country.
You might get a tedious person saying something like "actually, Wales is a principality".
Maybe not in isolation, but if you call the UK and England both countries in the same conversation you’re going to be met with confusion.
Maybe...? I mean not anyone I know but i'm in the UK to be fair.
It's like if you put four boxes in a box, it's not too confusing that the outer box is still a box.
I would be confused if someone called Wales a country. I thought Wales (unlike Scotland) was a region of England and had little autonomy. TIL.
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.
England is the country, part of the United Kingdom. Kingdom being the key word there, the US is a collection of countries ruled by the crown.
The commonwealth is also a collection of countries ruled by the crown; but it's not a country whereas the UK is a country.
Wales and Scotland are separate countries to England.
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.
To make things worse, sometimes team GB competes :) (Edit: in other sports)
England is a country, and if you're reading this on the BBC they most certainly are using the correct terminology.
It is not a sovereign country, but instead is a part of the constituents comprising the UK state.
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.)