An estimated 4 million Americans are chronically affected with hepatitis C, usually spread through blood. Ten thousand of those people will die.
Hepatitis C affects 170 million people worldwide and is the leading cause of liver transplants. One third of those transplants have been infected with the disease. You can get it from blood transfusions, sharing needles or coming into contact with the blood of an infected person. Did you know one of the more common ways is having your ears pierced?
But Aethlon Medical, Inc., a provider of selective therapeutic filtration devices for infectious disease, cancer and other life-threatening conditions, reported today what appears to be a breakthrough in treatment. The presence of Hepatitis C virus (HCV) has not been found in infected patients that have been treated with the Aethlon Hemopurifier® in combination with peginterferon+ribavirin (PR) drug therapy, for 90 days, the company announced in a press release.
HCV-infected individuals enrolled in a study at the Medanta Medicity Institute (Medicity) in India who received up to three, six-hour Hemopurifier® treatments during the first three days of PR drug therapy, found it to be “well- tolerated and without device-related adverse events in nine treated patients,” the press release said.
Seven of the nine have been monitored for more than ninety days and all seven “currently maintain undetectable viral load, including three patients who have been monitored for 48-weeks,” according to Aethlon.
A key issue of the study was to evaluate whether the Hemopurifier® could speed up the elimination of HCV to “the same levels as those associated with treated patients who achieve the highest rate of viral cure, including individuals that previously failed or relapsed PR drug regimens.”
The reason this is such good news is that the death rate from HCV will triple in the next 20 years, according to the Home Access Healthcare Corporation.
Right now this treatment is only offered in India. But Aethlon has requested permission from the Medicity internal review board (IRB) to begin offering Hemopurifier® therapy to HCV-infected individuals who live outside of India.
Edited by
Brooke Neuman
