6 New Treatments That Can Save Your Life
Reader's Digest UK|June 2018

Cancer, stroke, hepatitis—all words we once feared. But thanks to great medical advances, there are now…

Anita Bartholomew
6 New Treatments That Can Save Your Life
IN THE PAST, SOME DISEASE DIAGNOSES USED TO STRIKE fear in all of us. But today, thanks to medical advances, this is no longer always true. Today, vaccines protect our families from once deadly diseases. Antibiotics vanquish infections that used to kill tens of thousands. Cancers that were once eminently lethal are now more like chronic illnesses that people can live with for many years. We can all take heart from these amazing advances in prevention and treatment

Hepatitis C

Approximately 14 million Europeans are infected.

THE GOOD NEWS

Now there is a cure.

HOW IT HAPPENED

In 2013 a new class of anti-viral drugs became available.

IT WAS THE EARLY 1990S, and Leigh-Anne Maxwell had no idea why, for years, she’d felt so awful; neither did her doctors. They’d tested for mononucleosis, anemia, and other obvious causes. Nothing. She was exhausted. She was nauseated. Active for most of her life, the 62-year-old enjoyed exploring the woods on Mayne Island in British Columbia, where she lives.

No one connected her symptoms to the emergency surgery she’d undergone years before. It wasn’t until she tried giving blood that she finally got a diagnosis. The Red Cross had begun testing donors for the hepatitis C virus in 1990 and notified her she could no longer be a donor. She was infected.

Because hepatitis C is transmitted by blood, she knew immediately that the transfusion that had saved her life had infected her.

This story is from the June 2018 edition of Reader's Digest UK.

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This story is from the June 2018 edition of Reader's Digest UK.

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