Later City News: Taiwan is on track to accelerating Hepatitis C elimination by 2025.

Taiwan accelerated its efforts to eliminate hepatitis C in 2018 by committing to achieve WHO's 2030 goal of treating 80% of eligible patients by 2025. It is doing this by treating 250 000 chronic hepatitis C (CHC) patients with direct-acting antivirals (DAAs) under Hepatitis C Policy Guideline 2018-2025 that increases policy effectiveness, communication, and coordination.

With the goal of reaching 80% treatment coverage, the Taiwan Hepatitis C Policy Guideline's triple focus – therapy spearheads prevention, screening supports therapy and prevention secures out-come4 – will help Taiwan achieve WHO's HCV elimination goal by 2025.

The authors of this paper Grace Hui‐Min Wu, Raoh‐Fang Pwu, Shih‐Chung Chen, Ding‐Shinn Chen hope other countries can benefit from our experience.

You can find the full paper by clicking here

In short, Taiwan is on track to eliminate the hepatitis C virus (HCV) by 2025 because of aggressive measures by the Ministry of Health and Welfare. These include several key success factors listed by Razavi's study1: a political commitment by the Ministry of Health and Welfare to finance this national program and remove National Health Insurance reimbursement restrictions for treatment.

In addition, the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control instituted harm reduction programs and the health ministry's hepatitis C office instituted monitoring and evaluation. We are continuing to expand other measures noted as key success factors, including awareness and active screen-ing programs, and funding to linkage to care programs. Moreover, expanded treatment capacity was not considered as an important success factor to the elimination program, because the capacity of specialists in Taiwan is enough to handle the existing HCV-infected population