José Carlos Saldanha, the man who stood up in the Assembly of the Republic and pleaded for medical treatment of hepatitis C, died this Friday in Lisbon.
José Carlos Saldanha died this Friday at the Santa Maria hospital in Lisbon, where he was hospitalized. Born in Mozambique, he was 55 years old and resided in the Portuguese capital.
He became known during an audience with the then Minister of Health, Paulo Macedo, at the request of the PCP, on February 4, 2015. José Carlos Saldanha interrupted the work and made an appeal to the Government, which was negotiating the price of the medicine with the pharmaceutical company .
“Don’t let me die,” said José Carlos Saldanha, who was attending the hearing alongside the son of a woman who had died of hepatitis C. This call, on the day that several people demonstrated outside Parliament, alerted society to the problem of these patients. At the time, in Portugal, treatment cost about 50 thousand euros and was inaccessible to most patients.
