From Baby Boomers to Universal HCV Testing: John W. Ward, MD

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Addressing hepatitis C care and prevention should scale within individual communities and health systems but also on a national scale. The combined effort is what leaders suggest could keep the US on track to reduce infections and transmission, with the ultimate goal of elimination.

At IDWeek 2026, held October 21 to 24, 2026, in Washington, DC, experts sat on a panel titled “Global Elimination of Hepatitis C in 2026,” addressing barriers to preventive care and treatment. About 12 years ago, the national recommendation called for testing and treating baby boomers, those born between 1945 and 1965, because of their high risk from transmission that occurred before the virus was discovered in 1989, when donated blood was not screened and infection control was not as strong. With this policy broadly adopted, there has been an approximate 50% decline in mortality from hepatitis C across the baby boomer population, John W. Ward, MD, director of the Coalition for Global Hepatitis Elimination at the Task Force for Global Health, said in an interview with The American Journal of Managed Care®.

But despite this success, there has still been a surge of new infections in the past decade, he emphasized, which led the national recommendation to expand to everyone, not solely one particular demographic.

“Unfortunately, because we don’t have good prevention for new infections, we’ve had an explosion, an epidemic of new infections for the last 10 to 12 years in the US, and so we’ve expanded the recommendation where everybody needs to be tested at least once,” Ward explained.

Getting prevention services into the communities that need them is key, he said. That includes making clean injection equipment available and having clinics that provide testing and treatment in those communities. Patient-centered care can help make testing and treatment more convenient and accessible, and reducing stigma can help counter the view that the populations at highest risk are “other” populations, he said. Peer navigators with similar lived experience can also educate others in their community about the benefits of testing and treatment and help patients complete the 2 to 3 months of treatment needed to achieve a 95% cure rate.

In “both of those examples, getting the community at the…person level is really, really key,” Ward said. “And then, once it’s there, to have the services there that people can benefit from getting diagnosed and cured of this infection.”