Virus sufferer is forced to wait three years for treatment
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Your support makes all the difference.In the three years since Brenda Binge was diagnosed with hepatitis C, she has seen a doctor once, a nurse twice and had an ultrasound test but she is still waiting for treatment.
The 57-year-old former hotelier has been married for 30 years, never dabbled in drugs, and suspects she became infected through a blood transfusion in the early 1980s. She is angry at the lack of urgency shown by the NHS to people in her predicament.
"It is very distressing because I feel I have a death sentence hanging over me," she says. "Although there are drugs that can treat hepatitis C I am denied them. You can have cirrhosis, liver cancer and liver failure and no one is doing anything."
After being diagnosed in 2000, Mrs Binge moved from Bath to Sussex where she was referred to a liver specialist only after "constant pestering".
Her appointment has been cancelled twice and she has not yet seen him. A week before Christmas she received a letter telling her that the kind of hepatitis C she had - genotype 1B - was one of the hardest to treat. "To say I am upset is to put it mildly," she says. "I was going to call my MP. The Government is burying its head in the sand. A lot of people don't know they have got it and because no one makes a fuss no one is doing anything. It's a shocking neglect of the nation's health.This is a very nasty illness."
Mrs Binge, who serves as a councillor on Mid-Sussex District Council and once stood as a Tory parliamentary candidate, has been told that after treatment starts with a cocktail of drugs she will need an injection once a week and pills each day for a year. The cost of the drugs is about £7,000. "What are they waiting for?" she asks. "Perhaps if I die they can save money and won't have to treat me."
Although her marital status was known to the NHS, she had never been given any advice about how to prevent her husband, Rod, 59, a financial adviser, becoming infected.
"We never had any advice about protective sex even though the virus can be passed on that way," she adds. "I am anxious now to do anything I can to get this issue more widely known."
More information on hepatitis C can be found at www.hepcuk.info.
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