An Unbelievable Fact on “Dialysis Centers Without Hepatitis C Infection”

Implication for health policy makers/practice/research/medical education: Understanding the view of epidemiology of HCV infection in hemodialysis patients can help health policy makers for better decisions. Epidemiology of hepatitis C infection has changed during the recent years and I recommend all scientists to review the achievements in control of hepatitis C in Iranian hemodialysis patients. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is the second viral cause for chronic liver disease (CLD) in the world and nearly 170 million people are infected worldwide (1, 2). The history of transfusion before 1992 (time of blood and blood products screening), illegal drug using, exposures among health care workers, unprotected multi-partner sexual contact, and chronic hemodialysis are known risk factors for HCV infection (3-5). HCV infection is a common infection in hemodialysis (HD) patients as well as dialy-sis centers (6). It is currently the major cause of CLD and mortality after kidney transplantation (7). Distribution of HCV infection among HD patients is not globally homogenous. We performed a multicenter study in Tehran in 2002 and the prevalence of HCV infection among HD patients was around 13% (8). We systematically reviewed all published and unpublished documents related to HCV infection prevalence in Iranian HD patients from April 2001 to March 2008 (9). Eighteen studies from 12 provinces (consisting of 49.02% of the total Iranian population) reported prevalence of HCV infection in Iranian HD patients. HCV infection prevalence in Iranian HD patients was 7.61% and showing that the burden has changed during the recent years (9). In 2006, we started a project for control of hepatitis C infection in dialysis patients (10). Iran Hepatitis Network (IHN), Ministry of Health and Medical Education (MOHME), many experts in hemodialysis and gastro-enterology and infectious departments in many universities were involved in it in Iran. We presented main strategies for control of HCV infection in dialysis centers that consisted of: periodic screening of HCV in di-alysis centers and reporting to MOHME for evaluation, distributing information to both patients and health staffs, training courses and congresses in various cities with more focus on the cities with higher HCV infection prevalence, treatment of HCV-positive patients with approved protocols, treatment according to a widely approved protocol, and putting HCV-positive HD patients in the …