Illustration of Hepatitis C. © 2015 Merdeka.com/shutterstock/docstockmedia
Merdeka.com – Two Americans and a British person won the Nobel Prize in Medicine 2020 on Monday for identifying the Hepatitis C virus. The discovery of the Hepatitis C virus is a study that has been going on since 1960 and has helped limit the spread of the deadly disease and develop anti-viral drugs to cure it .
The discoveries of scientists Harvey Alter, Charles Rice and British citizen Michael Houghton mean there is an opportunity to eradicate the Hepatitis C virus, a goal the World Health Organization (WHO) aims to achieve in the next decade.
The three of them shared an award of 10 million Swedish kron (US $ 1.1 million) for finding evidence that a blood-borne virus can cause Hepatitis C, which afflicts more than 70 million people and causes about 400,000 deaths each year.
“This is news which is enormous, will no doubt revive efforts to eliminate Hepatitis C as a global threat by 2030, “said Professor Gregory Dore, head of the Clinical Viral Hepatitis Research Program at Kirby Institute in Sydney, Australia.
Nominations for this year’s awards predate the global spread of the novel coronavirus pandemic, but the winners’ choice recognizes the importance of identifying the virus as the first step in winning the battle against a new disease, said Thomas Perlmann, who is the Secretary General of the Nobel Assembly.
Perlmann said he managed to contact Alter and Rice earlier in their day in the United States. “They are very surprised, happy and speechless,” he told reporters as quoted by Reuters from Monday (5/10).
This is the second Nobel Medicine Prize awarded for hepatitis research after Baruch Blumberg won in 1976 for the discovery that a form of blood-borne hepatitis is caused by a virus that has become known as Hepatitis B.Hepatitis A, which is easily treated, is transmitted through water or contaminated food.
“Before the discovery of the Hepatitis C virus, getting a blood transfusion was a bit like the Russian roulette game,” said Nobel Committee member Nils-Goran Larsson, adding that millions of people can now receive safe transfusions and blood products.
