6/7/2013:
A progressive public health initiative taken by North Dakota’s prison system garnered national attention on this date in 2007. Although relatively small, with fewer than 1,500 inmates, the state’s prisons were attempting to tackle what the World Health Organization has called the new “silent killer” – Hepatitis C. After a National Public Radio program highlighted the initiative on June 6th, several national newspapers carried the story, shedding light on an oft-hidden problem.
Hepatitis C is a chronic blood infection that causes liver failure or liver cancer in one out of every four of those infected. The disease can remain dormant for years, and most of those infected don’t know they have it. Prison populations are especially susceptible, since many of the same activities that spread the disease – drug use, tattooing, and piercings – are the same activities that prove popular among prison inmates. The inmates would also carry the hepatitis out of the prison and into the general population once they were released. Some estimates suggest that as many as 40% of prison inmates in the United States are infected, compared to only 2% of the general population. The World Health Organization claims that hepatitis C infections are poised to sky-rocket, and already label its growing incidence an epidemic.
Since the late 1990s, a methamphetamine epidemic has caused North Dakota’s prison population to triple. Contracting Hepatitis C through infected drug needles is extremely common, so meth users are frequently infected. Medical Services director Kathleen Bachmeier saw the looming threat to the state’s prison population, and initiated a program that tested all new inmates for the disease. The state “…now treats anyone who meets certain medical criteria, whose sentence is long enough to complete the course of treatment and who is willing to try to quit using drugs.”
In 2012, North Dakota prisons began using new testing methods for hepatitis C and HIV that can provide results in minutes, rather than the six days required for the traditional oral-swab method. North Dakota’s policy has been lauded across the country, at a time when many other states’ prison systems are facing lawsuits from inmates who have contracted hepatitis C.
Dakota Datebook written by Jayme L. Job
Sources:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10758143
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17615346/ns/health-infectious_diseases/t/prisons-deadliest-inmate-hepatitis-c-escaping/