I am glad they’re screening for it. I was born to someone who had the virus, but didn’t know I had Hep C myself until I submitted myself to an exceptionally thorough STI testing panel. I say exceptional, because the standard ones I’d done throughout college and early adulthood do not happen to include that particular test. So I feel a bit lucky to have been able to get diagnosed and treated in my mid-20s, before the disease could do much damage.
Hep C screening at least once for adults >= 18 is recommended and considered standard of care in the United States. I checked my medical records and I have a negative Hep C result in an old checkup when I was younger, and another one from a new provider who insisted on a big panel of standard testing for new patients (despite me having no risk factors).
It’s unfortunate that your early providers dropped the ball. I wonder if they assumed you had already been tested for some reason?
Crazy how different healthcare is in different countries.
In the UK once you've had your childhood vaccinations it's entirely possible you'd simply never see a doctor again in your life until you're ready for your prostate exam in older life.
There are no regular checkups or preventative care on the NHS for mid life adults unless you're proactive
I presume you're not a woman, because there's cervical screening for women aged 25-64 every five years. Also depends on what you mean by "mid life", but there's breast screening offered to women aged 50-70 and bowel cancer screening offered to people from 50 to 74 every two years.
There are real trade-offs with screening, and screening too much has harms as well as too little, although I'm not qualified to make a judgement on where that line sits relative to where it is in the UK.
To be fair, almost nobody is going from childhood vaccinations > late-middle age without seeing a doctor. And when you do go with an ailment general blood tests seem pretty standard these days at GP's along with standard vitals checks. They also do preventive care where necessary. Every woman is invited for cervical screening once they turn 25 and then every few years until they're in their 60's. Regular mammograms are also a thing after a certain age/depending on risk factors. Bowel cancer screening too. STI testing is free and, depending on where you live, done by post. Also depending on your definition of 'childhood' there are a few vaccines given when you're a teenager (HPV for example). And if you ever travel you'll be visiting the doctor for vaccines then too.
I'm not a trump fan, but the antivax train has nothing to do with him. (Evidence: Canada is doing even worse then us when it comes to measles). If we want to fix this problem (we do), the first step is to recognize the actual problem, not to play the blame game on whichever politician you currently don't like!
The reason there are measles cases is because a decent percentage of people aren't getting vaccinated anymore. If all of the cases were 2 year olds or younger (when RFK was put in charge) then possibly. But not only are they older (https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html), this is also happening in Canada. I don't see how it could possibly be RFK's fault.
While It’s fair to point out that RFK is hopping on a train that’s already got momentum, your first comment reads as if it’s not caused by falling vaccination rates (your second comment clarified further).
Also why not blame politicians doing the wrong thing?
Perhaps I should've been clearer. And yes they aren't helping.
And yes, we should blame them for the things they do. T
But the comment I was responding to was acting as if MAGA was the reason for measles outbreaks, which is false. I'm an incredibly strong believer in the truth. An example of why I think this is an important separation: imagine you tried to fix the measles outbreak and miraculously got every single American to hate Trump and got Trump out of office. The problem would still not be fixed! People would still be dying of measles! The effort would have been almost completely wasted!
A major campaign by RFK's replacement could absolutely make a significant difference stopping the spread of measles. That's the whole point of the (proven extremely effective!) vaccine.
He is amplifying the issue, but you're right, Trump is a symptom of the underlying problem. The problem is that internet gave these idiots a platform to mislead people.
Back in the early 90s this wasn't much of a problem. Childhood vaccine requirements weren't some hot-button topic then. Most people would just get them when faced with the requirement. Most opposition was isolated to people who were otherwise contrarians already.
The difference now is that the internet is full of these isolated contrarians who are now influencing gullible people who don't know who to trust.
Completely agree! I will add though: this is a symptom of a problem that started 10-20 years ago. There's a lot of lag time between parents not giving their babies vaccines and outbreaks actually happening. You can see ages here.(https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html) 5 and under are only 20% of cases.
They have 10% our population and had twice the cases last year (admittedly, we're starting to catch up). But the truth is that there are huge lag times when it comes to measles / antivax. This is a symptom of a problem that started 10-20 years ago.
See my other responses. Do you really think RFK could possibly have had an effect on vaccinations over the last 2 decades in the US OR Canada?
Since you seem very emotionally opposed to Trump and his administration: I also don't like Trump or RFK! However, to solve a problem, you have to find the root cause of the problem, and pointing at the most recent politician you hate will never help anyone.
"The order recommends that all shots be given at separate medical visits, a frequent point Trump has made despite the safety, ease and lower costs of giving vaccines together."
'“Together, there could be a possibility they’re quite lethal,” Trump said of the MMR vaccine at the signing of the order on Monday.'
'Asked if he had evidence that the combined MMR vaccine was “lethal”, Trump said: “No. What I’ve heard is that there are some people who say it is that way.”'
Antivax fundamentally has its contemporary roots in Andrew Wakefield's fraudulent anti-MMR campaign.
So directing by executive order and by his own admission without evidence that the MMR vaccine be split up into separate shots is, very clearly, an antivax action. This is the first victory that Wakefield (a man who had a patent on a single measles vaccine!) wanted, and RFK Jr was pursuing.
But this is Trump saying this and signing it. So as of yesterday, it now has everything to do with Trump, sorry. He has handed the anti-MMR movement its ultimate victory and in so doing validated the entire antivax worldview.
See my other responses. Obviously this is bad. But the current measles outbreak is a symptom of a problem that's been happening over the last 1 or 2 decades. It literally CANNOT be caused by this, neither in the US or Canada.
It's still not too late for anyone who is unvaccinated to get the vaccine! Hopefully the next administration undoes this change, but the really important part is managing to shrink the anti-vax movement (which, if you look at the data in my other comments, you can see has been a problem since before Trump).
It has a lot to do with him. He doesn't actually have an opinion on any policy issue. For various political reasons, Trump decided to let RFK dictate public health policy according to his extremely delusional ideas. Yes, there was an antivax movement in this country for many years, just as there has been misogyny, racism, and transphobia. Trump has normalized and supercharged all of these moronic and dangerous ideas.
I have not been following measles in Canada, so I can't address that.
See my other comments; it is not possible for RFK to have had any effect on this outbreak. If everyone getting measles was 2 or under, it could be possible; they aren't.
The reason I bring up Canada is as counterevidence; if it was Trump or RFK'S fault, Canada should be doing just fine. They had twice the cases last year in 1/10 the population. The truth is this is a problem with people believing stupid things, and it's going to take a lot more than Trump going out of office to fix.
Right, because tapping one of the world's biggest vaccine truthers to run the Department of HHS and then proceed to link autism with vaccines and change the recommended MMR vaccine scheduling for children has absolutely no impact on anyone.
Trump is trying to hang Fauci. That goes in the completely opposite direction of promoting the trust of medical institutions in general society, and it's trust that will get people back to vaccinating themselves and their children.
>> Canada is doing even worse then us when it comes to measles
Not in Canada but unfortunately US nonsense spreads globally pretty quickly these days. The amount of Trump support in the UK is both bizarre and surprising. When someone with the worlds largest megaphone lies about vaccines, unfortunately people everywhere listen.
>I'm not a trump fan, but the antivax train has nothing to do with him.
Well not nothing. But it predates him and he adopted the movement early in his political career. When I was in high school (2004-8) antivax sentiment was generally associated with liberal Democrats in places like Marin County. This was a favorite retort of conservatives when confronted with their own backwardness on scientific understanding of evolution and climate change. In 2015 Trump began courting the anti-vaccine crowd and the political valence of that flavor of woo-woo nonsense flipped seemingly overnight. It was surreal to see it happen in real time. By 2020 he had lost control of the monster he helped create and the crowd booed him when he said they should get the Covid vaccine.
He was literally spreading FUD about vaccines today. And the measles stuff has got so bad RFK had to mildy backtrack on his previous antivax statements in recent interviews.
From today:
Both Trump and Kennedy made repeated mentions of autism throughout the order signing, emphasizing a scientifically unproven link between vaccines and the condition. Dozens of studies show no link between the two.
“Today we’re proud to officially announce the United States of America’s gold standard childhood vaccination recommendations. That has to do with many subjects including autism in particular,” Trump said at the beginning of the order signing.
“I’ve seen proof of it, where they have a vaccination where it looks like the size of a bottle of soda, poured into a little child’s body and bad things happen in too many cases,” Trump later said on breaking up each shot into an individual medical visit, before adding: “This is an explosion, it’s an epidemic,” in an apparent reference to autism.
Strangely, anti-vax sentiment is surging in a lot of countries. Canada has higher rates of vaccine rejection than the United States in some categories, as one example.
It’s a strange global phenomenon and I don’t think there is one single root cause. MAGA/MAHA definitely jumped on to the anti-vax train as it became popular, but many forget that Trump presided over the rushing of the COVID vaccine into availability and production. He hasn’t done vaccination any favors in recent years, but I’m skeptical that the widespread rise of vaccine skepticism can be attributable to this administration alone.
I think there’s a bigger story about the cyclical nature of how the dangers of threats that previous generations faced is slowly lost over time, combined with the rise of contrarianism and conspiratorial thinking on social media.
Given the amount of cultural influence the USA has and the universal nature of the internet it seems likely to me that global anti-vax sentiment could have started with the USA.
I don't think the general public were as influenced by a paper in the Lancet as they were by other members of the public (and media) talking about that study.
There is some evidence that anti-vac activism was one of the key topics pushed by foreign influence campaigns at several points. I think the simple explanation is that they pushed any topic which could be used for political divisiveness and unrest, but fomenting anti-vac sentiment is especially damaging due to the physical harms it causes.
Contemporary pharmaceutical companies, as well as contemporary government and private health institutions are my enemy. I would rather die than live using their products and services.
When more ethical entities take over their business I will gladly start using them once again, as I did back in the day before they turned evil.
I am very prepared to get downvoted for bringing this up - but I'm not convinced that the "anti-vax movement" most people think of is truly to blame (that is, crazy people who think it gives you autism or whatever).
At least in my area, there are pockets of (relatively) new immigrants that have MMR vaccination rates at around 30% (that's very low, much lower than the anti-vaxxer population could account for imo), and the reasons for that have nothing to do with MAGA/MAHA as far as I can tell.
It's an entirely different problem (that needs solving), and pretending that this is simply the by-product of uneducated crazies on the internet feels like it's over indexing on a loud and flashy but ultimately small part of the problem.
Here [1] is a montage of some of the public messaging around the COVID vaccines. [1] It was quite simply dishonest. That, paired alongside the effort to force people to take the shots, completely destroyed public trust on a level that will take many decades to repair. Generalized vaccine skepticism follows naturally from that.
I'm certainly a part of that group. For instance I ended up doing extensive research on e.g. MMR before deciding to vaccinate my kids for it. If this were a decade ago, I almost certainly would have done it without a second thought, just as I took all recommended vaccines before traveling without a second thought. So I'm obviously not anti-vaccine in the least, but I no longer trust public messaging on the topic.
It was just another (of the increasingly endless) examples of governments/companies pursuing short-term interests while ignoring long-term consequences. When it comes to what people put in their bodies, trust is more important than literally anything else.
Interesting that it's just England (and not Scotland, Wales, or NI). I realize they all have independent NHSs, but still would assume a program like this would rolled out across all the constituent countries.
Each nation has different social and health issues, each nation makes its own plan.
All four nations NHSes work with a single charity, the Hep C Trust.
They're all following the WHO targets for elimination -- you're hearing about this now soon after World Hepatitis Day (July 28th, as conceived of by the WHO).
I wouldn't have assumed this really because really the whole point of devolution is that they get to choose what to prioritise, so perhaps the other nations choose to do something they consider to be more pressing for their populations.
I don't know if borders matter much in this case. It's approximately just as easy to travel to England from many other countries as it is to travel to England from the rest of the UK.
It is a lot harder to travel into England from outside of the United Kingdom than it is to travel from England to Scotland or Wales. For one, I do not need a passport to get on a train to Scotland. Nor do I need a visa.
But you most likely have a passport, and most (western/european) countries have "automatic" visas to the UK, so for the most part, training from London to Edinburgh isn't much easier than Paris to London. Sure there is no passport control, but UK passport control is typically just scan your passport's chip and look at a camera.
I work with people who actively chose to go to conference in Berlin instead of the UK due to visa issues. The passport control is a real issue one cannot just handwave away.
It's quicker to travel to London from Paris and Calais than it is from parts of Scotland. Even though much of the UK's infrastructure acts as a feeder into London. No, we don't need passports but some people in London seem to have the idea that it's just down the road from us, which it isn't.
If you want to get to Glasgow from Campbelltown it can take you as long as three hours for example, and that's before you hit the motorway. Trying to get from west Sutherland to London is worse. Trying to get there from the Hebrides or Northen Isles even more so.
The borders between Scotland, England, and Wales are effectively like state borders in the US. Unless you see a street sign, you wouldn't know you crossed it.
NI is physically on a different island, so requires a boat or plane ride.
And all of the UK (ignoring the territories and ex-colonies) is on islands. And require a valid passport, passing through customs/immigration checks, and either a plane, boat, or train ride.
Most of the Scottish border is fairly physically obvious, unlike Wales (although the Severn bridge is).
Tens of thousands of people live on islands other than Britain and Ireland. Much of Scotland is not even considered UK mainland by delivery firms, even major places such as Perth.
Given that Great Britain is an island, it is still much easier to drive down the M6/A74(M) or take a hike around the Welsh borders than say, take a flight or swim.
It can be quicker to reach southern England from continental Europe than from Northern Ireland or many parts of Scotland. Or the Isle of Man (which I'm well aware is a Crown Dependency.)
The UK consists of a number of islands. We have hundreds in Scotland with tens of thousands of people living on the other ones. England and Wales have significant ones such as the Isle of Wight, Ynys Môn and Lindisfarne. The IOW has at least 100,000 on it.
Nah we are good - We have our problems (including our own version of your guy but he hasn't won yet and is currently running against a man with a bin on his head) but on the whole, nah we are good.
Well, then, we can offer you measles, instead. How's that? We're also working on bringing back polio and smallpox. Think of it as our contribution to FREEDOM!
Farage isn't quite the same and of course the situation is rather different.
The three jobs are divided up differently, though still between too few people. You have a Figurehead, the Head of State, which here is King Charles and in the US is Donald Trump. That's the part Trump most likes, you get free gold stuff, you're allowed to do whatever you please, everybody is supposed to suck up to you, hooray. Farage would not get that job.
Next you've got Executive leader. Trump doesn't enjoy this as much. People keep trying to blame him for the fact he's bad at it. He appointed people he saw on TV to run things, how is it his fault they're not brilliant? This would be half of Farage's job as Prime Minister and he likes being asked to account for his incompetence even less than Trump.
Finally Head of the Legislature, in the US this isn't Trump's job, Mike Johnson is in the House and John Thune in the Senate. Farage would get this job in full as the Prime Minister. Even before he resigned he was rarely actually in Westminster, it's boring and you need to be good at actual politics, so of course he's not there, he gets paid more to be somewhere else.
I also don't think Nigel can put together the numbers. Trump has Mike and John to try to make the numbers work, and Farage wouldn't have that. "My way or the highway" is what Farage would say, and that doesn't make the numbers work. That's how you lose a Confidence motion and you're back on your arse in six weeks.
[Edited to correct the Senate leader, mistake pointed out by ragnese below]
Good explanation. Just one correction: John Thune is the Senate majority leader (so, the "head" of the Senate). Steve Scalise is in the House and he's the head of the Republican party in the House, whereas Mike Johnson (who is also a Republican) is the House majority leader (so the head of the whole House, not just his party).
So, it's Mike Johnson for the House and John Thune for the Senate.
> The target of treating 80% of all known cases has already been met, and deaths from the virus have fallen by 36% in the last decade, just short of what is needed by 2030.
What is needed by 2030? There is no mention prior to this statement.
Later:
> NHS England says that since 2015, more than 100,000 people have been diagnosed and treated for hepatitis C, meaning the country is already meeting that target.
Again, what target are we talking about??
Much later:
> Prof Frankie Swords, NHS national medical director, added: "England is now leading the world in the mission to eliminate this disease and on course to beat the WHO's 2030 target, but we are determined to keep up the momentum and finish the job.
I think you are partially correct. They trained AI on their articles to produce the same style articles. I am not a large consumer of BBC articles. This style of snippet after snippet is annoying. Perhaps that is why I am not a large consumer of BBC articles.
> Style Assist helps BBC journalists quickly adapt trusted content into BBC News house style, speeding up the publication of high-quality local stories. It uses a BBC-trained AI model to generate a draft, which is always reviewed and edited by journalists before publication. This helps save time while maintaining accuracy, tone and editorial standards. Find out more in an article from Rhodri Talfan Davies.
Style Assist is mainly for articles written by journalists that are employed by third-party news organisations (who own the UK's local news outlets) but are subsidised by the BBC - these people are "local democracy reporters".
LDRS articles are made free to everyone in the scheme (including the BBC), but because the content is written primarily for their home news org the articles that end up being published by the BBC need to be modified to comply with the BBC's editorial guidelines and for style reasons.
My reading of the article was aggressive response by single payer healthcare (i.e. NHS) is responsible so that would be almost impossible politically in USA as long as senate exists on top of non scientific medical authorities.
That's true, I was recollecting when we had somewhat ordinary politics in USA and Affordable Care Act passed when Democrats had majority in Senate but making it single payer was stopped by purported Democrat Joe Leiberman.
I have zero idea about who RFK Jr is or what it does, aside from being the US Secretary of Health, a country of which I am neither a citizen or resident.
Trump just issued an order reducing childhood vaccines, plus there is a Hep C vaccine which is being ignored by the CDC. Never mind the resurgence of many childhood diseases thanks to RFK jr and Trump.
I do not know why some people think the current US regime will follow England with all evidence pointing to doing the exact opposite.
Honestly, Mehmet Oz deserves more of the blame here. He and the other people who are fighting to make healthcare expensive and inaccessible create situations where people aren't being diagnosed and cured of Hep C, which leaves them passing the infection to others through sexual contact, sharing needles, etc.
RFK Jr. is an anti-vax crackpot, but Hep C isn't vaccine-preventable. On the other hand, we can absolutely blame RFK Jr. for our rising Hep A, B, and D rates.
> "Treatment involves a free course of antiviral tablets lasting 8 to 12 weeks, which cures more than 95% of cases."
must be nice to have a government that actually cares about its citizens health, we're still waiting DECADES for that Republican health care plan (other than "just die quietly")
You take antivirals orally. There is no vaccine that I'm aware of. I got Hep C from a blood transfusion in the 80s and waited decades without symptoms for modern antivirals before finally getting treated.
Literally nothing in the article points to it being eliminated, only reaching a target of diagnosing 90% of the cases, which doesn't do anything to eliminate it when a large number of cases comes from drug users which are unlikely to care very much about it.
> The target of treating 80% of all known cases has already been met, and deaths from the virus have fallen by 36% in the last decade, just short of what is needed by 2030. Taking antiviral tablets for 8 to 12 weeks can cure more than 95% of cases.
So indeed diagnosing the cases is leading directly to deaths prevented.
> So indeed diagnosing the cases is leading directly to deaths prevented.
This is not what the title claims. The title claims that hepatitis C is to be eliminated, aka 0%. This is not possible; anyone with a basic 101 virology knows why. BBC lies here via the title.
Elimination doesn't mean there are no incidences of it, it means no new cases diagnosed in England. This is a result of reducing the cases so much that the chance of catching it drops to virtually zero. Drug users have a range of cleaner alternatives today than 10 years ago so is less of an issue but also if very few people have it, the chance of a drug user sharing a needle with someone who has becomes very small indeed.
What do you mean by this? The article quotes an NHS director backing up the statement in the title.
> England is now leading the world in the mission to eliminate this disease and on course to beat the WHO's 2030 target, but we are determined to keep up the momentum and finish the job.
Just to understand this: When someone says "country England", do they mean "country" like in "nation", considering England a separate nation, or is it a lapse and they mean UK? Is England usually referred to as a country, or just part of a country?
I usually think of a country as equal to a nation, and as far as I know, Wales and Scotland have not split off yet? Is the term "country" not actually that sharply defined?
EDIT: Thanks people, I just asked a question to better understand the terminology, you know ...
In this case it's health related and each of the countries in the UK have their own National Health Services (or Health and Social Care in NI). It's not a lapse here.
I don't understand. It's an article about England. They only have information to hand about England, from the authority tasked with dealing with health in England.
If I read an article from them about crime in London, quoting the Metropolitan Police, I don't immediately think that they don't care about, say, the West Midlands.
The BBC do use a consistent naming scheme, you're just not understanding the scheme. Scotland has their own devolved NHS, and track their own health statistics. Scotland not being mentioned is because the Hepatitis C Trust were talking about England's Hep C numbers, it wasn't an intentional slight on Scotland.
Confusingly the proper term for England, Scotland, Wales, and NI is country individually, the UK is a country of countries. They should probably be called states but they never have been, I'd pretty much always assume when someone says England to become the first country... that they mean England exclusively.
The bit that gets me is that people often refer to the UK but actually mean GB or vice versa.
When I've heard the distinction (often in a historical context), 'nation' is usually meant to mean a set of people in a place with some sense of collective identity or origin, while 'state' is the governing body which has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence within well defined borders. When these overlap the result is a nation-state, but they don't always line up so nearly. Using those definitions England, Wales, and Scotland are nations. Ireland (including northern Ireland) could also be called a nation (though, of course, as should be obvious by the fact that this does not line up with the borders of the state, this is a contentious topic). The United Kingdom is the state (and of course Ireland-minus-northern-ireland is also a state). 'Country' as a term generally doesn't imply either of these (it's just a name for some chunk of land, notionally), though it's often synonymous with the nation-state when the borders all actually line up neatly, as opposed to in the UK.
England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland are constituent countries in a larger country called the United Kingdom. When dealing with international affairs, you typically want to be talking about the UK (unless the subject is sport), as that is the sovereign state. But for domestic affairs, it’s often split in ways that are confusing if you don’t understand various bits of history stretching back about a thousand years.
For instance, England and Wales share a legal system, but Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own. There’s bunch of special things about Northern Ireland and its relation to Ireland. And all of the constituent countries have their own parliament / assembly except for England (the parliament in London is for the whole of the UK where MPs for all constituent countries can vote).
In this particular case, the constituent countries have their own health systems, so it’s normally England we would be talking about, not the UK.
OK, so now we have the following terms: State, nation, country, sovereign country.
For example in Germany one would say there are 16 states, but one wouldn't say that there are 16 countries. Never heard anyone claim that. So state seems to be different from country, at least here. Would people in the UK say that Scotland or Wales are "nations"? Or is at least that term very clearly only for units that could participate under a flag in lets say the olympics? (I assume here, that Scotland and Wales are not separately competing, but are under UK flag.)
"And by 'country' we mean a sovereign state that is a member of the UN in its own right" to quote the famous UK Quiz Show "Pointless".
Team GB enters the Olympics but as you may have noticed it was England who came Third in the World Cup recently, and likewise England play international rugby, including against Wales and Scotland.
The UK, crown dependencies and overseas territories compete as Great Britain in the Olympics rather than the UK. Northern Irish folks can compete for Ireland or GB.
As an English person I would say that Scotland and Wales are nations and countries; constituent countries of the country that is the UK.
Yeah England is a country. Like what else do we have the name “England” for? We talk a lot more about England than some non-country geography like Anatolia (Asian Turkey). For example there was no UK in the World Cup, but England made it quite far.
If that’s a bit eccentric, well this is the same place that refers to Europe as a different place even though France borders the UK by automobile road.
People in the UK would refer to England as a country and most people would actually be confused if you referred to the UK as a country, even though it technically is. People in England don’t really think of the UK as anything other than “the UK”. People from Scotland, Wales, and Ireland have more nuanced takes.
I'm English and I don't think England or Scotland or Wales are countries. People get confused because of football and rugby. They're nations. The country is the United Kingdom.
England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are constituent countries of the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom is also a country. You can disagree, but you're disagreeing with the government and the international community.
Scotland, Wales, and NI have their own parliaments at least, so from a constitutional perspective one could argue England is not a country but a state, but that is only one narrow definition.
The UK seems fairly relaxed about constituent parts leaving (Scotland was given a referendum, NI has option to leave if they want) - which I don't believe applies to US states?
I am glad they’re screening for it. I was born to someone who had the virus, but didn’t know I had Hep C myself until I submitted myself to an exceptionally thorough STI testing panel. I say exceptional, because the standard ones I’d done throughout college and early adulthood do not happen to include that particular test. So I feel a bit lucky to have been able to get diagnosed and treated in my mid-20s, before the disease could do much damage.
That's odd. I just looked at what I thought was a pretty standard piss and blood STI test results of my own, and it covered:
- Syphilis
- Hep B
- Hep C
- HIV 1 and 2 and P24
- Chlamydia
- Gonorrhoea
I forgot to mention my experience was in the northeastern USA in the 2000s-2010s. I’m happy you got a better standard of care than I did!
Hep C screening at least once for adults >= 18 is recommended and considered standard of care in the United States. I checked my medical records and I have a negative Hep C result in an old checkup when I was younger, and another one from a new provider who insisted on a big panel of standard testing for new patients (despite me having no risk factors).
It’s unfortunate that your early providers dropped the ball. I wonder if they assumed you had already been tested for some reason?
Crazy how different healthcare is in different countries.
In the UK once you've had your childhood vaccinations it's entirely possible you'd simply never see a doctor again in your life until you're ready for your prostate exam in older life.
There are no regular checkups or preventative care on the NHS for mid life adults unless you're proactive
I presume you're not a woman, because there's cervical screening for women aged 25-64 every five years. Also depends on what you mean by "mid life", but there's breast screening offered to women aged 50-70 and bowel cancer screening offered to people from 50 to 74 every two years.
There are real trade-offs with screening, and screening too much has harms as well as too little, although I'm not qualified to make a judgement on where that line sits relative to where it is in the UK.
To be fair, almost nobody is going from childhood vaccinations > late-middle age without seeing a doctor. And when you do go with an ailment general blood tests seem pretty standard these days at GP's along with standard vitals checks. They also do preventive care where necessary. Every woman is invited for cervical screening once they turn 25 and then every few years until they're in their 60's. Regular mammograms are also a thing after a certain age/depending on risk factors. Bowel cancer screening too. STI testing is free and, depending on where you live, done by post. Also depending on your definition of 'childhood' there are a few vaccines given when you're a teenager (HPV for example). And if you ever travel you'll be visiting the doctor for vaccines then too.
Ah OK, this was in London
Meanwhile, the USA is bringing back measles, mumps, rubella, Hep B, and lots of intestinal parasites. Back to the Future! MAGA!
This planet had always belonged to the fungi and the bacteria, the viruses and the protists.
It wasn't until the trump administration that I started to suspect that they're actively tampering with human politics.
and screw worms
I'm not a trump fan, but the antivax train has nothing to do with him. (Evidence: Canada is doing even worse then us when it comes to measles). If we want to fix this problem (we do), the first step is to recognize the actual problem, not to play the blame game on whichever politician you currently don't like!
You don't think RFK has anything to do with it?
The reason there are measles cases is because a decent percentage of people aren't getting vaccinated anymore. If all of the cases were 2 year olds or younger (when RFK was put in charge) then possibly. But not only are they older (https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html), this is also happening in Canada. I don't see how it could possibly be RFK's fault.
While It’s fair to point out that RFK is hopping on a train that’s already got momentum, your first comment reads as if it’s not caused by falling vaccination rates (your second comment clarified further).
Also why not blame politicians doing the wrong thing?
Perhaps I should've been clearer. And yes they aren't helping.
And yes, we should blame them for the things they do. T But the comment I was responding to was acting as if MAGA was the reason for measles outbreaks, which is false. I'm an incredibly strong believer in the truth. An example of why I think this is an important separation: imagine you tried to fix the measles outbreak and miraculously got every single American to hate Trump and got Trump out of office. The problem would still not be fixed! People would still be dying of measles! The effort would have been almost completely wasted!
A major campaign by RFK's replacement could absolutely make a significant difference stopping the spread of measles. That's the whole point of the (proven extremely effective!) vaccine.
COVID and anti-vaxxing explosion happened 6 years ago.
Look at the source I linked! Only 20% of cases are under 5!
He is amplifying the issue, but you're right, Trump is a symptom of the underlying problem. The problem is that internet gave these idiots a platform to mislead people.
Back in the early 90s this wasn't much of a problem. Childhood vaccine requirements weren't some hot-button topic then. Most people would just get them when faced with the requirement. Most opposition was isolated to people who were otherwise contrarians already.
The difference now is that the internet is full of these isolated contrarians who are now influencing gullible people who don't know who to trust.
Completely agree! I will add though: this is a symptom of a problem that started 10-20 years ago. There's a lot of lag time between parents not giving their babies vaccines and outbreaks actually happening. You can see ages here.(https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html) 5 and under are only 20% of cases.
> this is a symptom of a problem that started 10-20 years ago.
... and that's right when social media gained majority adoption among US adults.
Do you think it's also helpful that they see these things being pushed "for profit)
"Evidence" requires citations.
US: https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html
Canada: https://health-infobase.canada.ca/measles-rubella/archive/20...
They have 10% our population and had twice the cases last year (admittedly, we're starting to catch up). But the truth is that there are huge lag times when it comes to measles / antivax. This is a symptom of a problem that started 10-20 years ago.
You are willfully deluding yourself if you believe that. He put an anti-vax idiot as head of HHS. How is that "nothing"?
He was appointed and holds those views because these ideas are now popular... not the other way around.
See my other responses. Do you really think RFK could possibly have had an effect on vaccinations over the last 2 decades in the US OR Canada?
Since you seem very emotionally opposed to Trump and his administration: I also don't like Trump or RFK! However, to solve a problem, you have to find the root cause of the problem, and pointing at the most recent politician you hate will never help anyone.
YES.
Do you really think RFK appeared out of the ether? What do you think he's spent the last 2 decades doing?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/10/trump-vaccin...
"The order recommends that all shots be given at separate medical visits, a frequent point Trump has made despite the safety, ease and lower costs of giving vaccines together."
'“Together, there could be a possibility they’re quite lethal,” Trump said of the MMR vaccine at the signing of the order on Monday.'
'Asked if he had evidence that the combined MMR vaccine was “lethal”, Trump said: “No. What I’ve heard is that there are some people who say it is that way.”'
Antivax fundamentally has its contemporary roots in Andrew Wakefield's fraudulent anti-MMR campaign.
So directing by executive order and by his own admission without evidence that the MMR vaccine be split up into separate shots is, very clearly, an antivax action. This is the first victory that Wakefield (a man who had a patent on a single measles vaccine!) wanted, and RFK Jr was pursuing.
But this is Trump saying this and signing it. So as of yesterday, it now has everything to do with Trump, sorry. He has handed the anti-MMR movement its ultimate victory and in so doing validated the entire antivax worldview.
See my other responses. Obviously this is bad. But the current measles outbreak is a symptom of a problem that's been happening over the last 1 or 2 decades. It literally CANNOT be caused by this, neither in the US or Canada.
It's still not too late for anyone who is unvaccinated to get the vaccine! Hopefully the next administration undoes this change, but the really important part is managing to shrink the anti-vax movement (which, if you look at the data in my other comments, you can see has been a problem since before Trump).
It has a lot to do with him. He doesn't actually have an opinion on any policy issue. For various political reasons, Trump decided to let RFK dictate public health policy according to his extremely delusional ideas. Yes, there was an antivax movement in this country for many years, just as there has been misogyny, racism, and transphobia. Trump has normalized and supercharged all of these moronic and dangerous ideas.
I have not been following measles in Canada, so I can't address that.
See my other comments; it is not possible for RFK to have had any effect on this outbreak. If everyone getting measles was 2 or under, it could be possible; they aren't.
The reason I bring up Canada is as counterevidence; if it was Trump or RFK'S fault, Canada should be doing just fine. They had twice the cases last year in 1/10 the population. The truth is this is a problem with people believing stupid things, and it's going to take a lot more than Trump going out of office to fix.
Right, because tapping one of the world's biggest vaccine truthers to run the Department of HHS and then proceed to link autism with vaccines and change the recommended MMR vaccine scheduling for children has absolutely no impact on anyone.
I can't help but feel this is ragebait or a bot.
Trump is trying to hang Fauci. That goes in the completely opposite direction of promoting the trust of medical institutions in general society, and it's trust that will get people back to vaccinating themselves and their children.
>> Canada is doing even worse then us when it comes to measles
Not in Canada but unfortunately US nonsense spreads globally pretty quickly these days. The amount of Trump support in the UK is both bizarre and surprising. When someone with the worlds largest megaphone lies about vaccines, unfortunately people everywhere listen.
>I'm not a trump fan, but the antivax train has nothing to do with him.
Well not nothing. But it predates him and he adopted the movement early in his political career. When I was in high school (2004-8) antivax sentiment was generally associated with liberal Democrats in places like Marin County. This was a favorite retort of conservatives when confronted with their own backwardness on scientific understanding of evolution and climate change. In 2015 Trump began courting the anti-vaccine crowd and the political valence of that flavor of woo-woo nonsense flipped seemingly overnight. It was surreal to see it happen in real time. By 2020 he had lost control of the monster he helped create and the crowd booed him when he said they should get the Covid vaccine.
He was literally spreading FUD about vaccines today. And the measles stuff has got so bad RFK had to mildy backtrack on his previous antivax statements in recent interviews.
From today:
Both Trump and Kennedy made repeated mentions of autism throughout the order signing, emphasizing a scientifically unproven link between vaccines and the condition. Dozens of studies show no link between the two.
“Today we’re proud to officially announce the United States of America’s gold standard childhood vaccination recommendations. That has to do with many subjects including autism in particular,” Trump said at the beginning of the order signing.
“I’ve seen proof of it, where they have a vaccination where it looks like the size of a bottle of soda, poured into a little child’s body and bad things happen in too many cases,” Trump later said on breaking up each shot into an individual medical visit, before adding: “This is an explosion, it’s an epidemic,” in an apparent reference to autism.
America: hold my syringe...
Strangely, anti-vax sentiment is surging in a lot of countries. Canada has higher rates of vaccine rejection than the United States in some categories, as one example.
It’s a strange global phenomenon and I don’t think there is one single root cause. MAGA/MAHA definitely jumped on to the anti-vax train as it became popular, but many forget that Trump presided over the rushing of the COVID vaccine into availability and production. He hasn’t done vaccination any favors in recent years, but I’m skeptical that the widespread rise of vaccine skepticism can be attributable to this administration alone.
I think there’s a bigger story about the cyclical nature of how the dangers of threats that previous generations faced is slowly lost over time, combined with the rise of contrarianism and conspiratorial thinking on social media.
Given the amount of cultural influence the USA has and the universal nature of the internet it seems likely to me that global anti-vax sentiment could have started with the USA.
The pivotal paper that tried to link vaccines to autism came out of the UK and was published in The Lancet.
Assuming that the US was the root of the current surge of anti-vax idealism is not supported by the facts.
I don't think the general public were as influenced by a paper in the Lancet as they were by other members of the public (and media) talking about that study.
In fact, you can bet that other states deliberately stirred the pot
There is some evidence that anti-vac activism was one of the key topics pushed by foreign influence campaigns at several points. I think the simple explanation is that they pushed any topic which could be used for political divisiveness and unrest, but fomenting anti-vac sentiment is especially damaging due to the physical harms it causes.
Contemporary pharmaceutical companies, as well as contemporary government and private health institutions are my enemy. I would rather die than live using their products and services.
When more ethical entities take over their business I will gladly start using them once again, as I did back in the day before they turned evil.
interesting. so if you get a bacterial infection, you plan to succumb to it rather than take antibiotics?
When did that particular switch flip?
I am very prepared to get downvoted for bringing this up - but I'm not convinced that the "anti-vax movement" most people think of is truly to blame (that is, crazy people who think it gives you autism or whatever).
At least in my area, there are pockets of (relatively) new immigrants that have MMR vaccination rates at around 30% (that's very low, much lower than the anti-vaxxer population could account for imo), and the reasons for that have nothing to do with MAGA/MAHA as far as I can tell.
It's an entirely different problem (that needs solving), and pretending that this is simply the by-product of uneducated crazies on the internet feels like it's over indexing on a loud and flashy but ultimately small part of the problem.
Anti-vaxxing goes back literally centuries, but the internet definitely made it a THING.
Here [1] is a montage of some of the public messaging around the COVID vaccines. [1] It was quite simply dishonest. That, paired alongside the effort to force people to take the shots, completely destroyed public trust on a level that will take many decades to repair. Generalized vaccine skepticism follows naturally from that.
I'm certainly a part of that group. For instance I ended up doing extensive research on e.g. MMR before deciding to vaccinate my kids for it. If this were a decade ago, I almost certainly would have done it without a second thought, just as I took all recommended vaccines before traveling without a second thought. So I'm obviously not anti-vaccine in the least, but I no longer trust public messaging on the topic.
It was just another (of the increasingly endless) examples of governments/companies pursuing short-term interests while ignoring long-term consequences. When it comes to what people put in their bodies, trust is more important than literally anything else.
[1] - https://xcancel.com/ITGuy1959/status/1581034815700488192
Interesting that it's just England (and not Scotland, Wales, or NI). I realize they all have independent NHSs, but still would assume a program like this would rolled out across all the constituent countries.
Each nation has different social and health issues, each nation makes its own plan.
All four nations NHSes work with a single charity, the Hep C Trust.
They're all following the WHO targets for elimination -- you're hearing about this now soon after World Hepatitis Day (July 28th, as conceived of by the WHO).
https://www.hepctrust.org.uk/blog/2026/07/four-nations-on-th...
As for progress:
- July 2026: Wales doesn't have percentage-of-population counts but here's its latest report: https://phw.nhs.wales/reports/trends-in-the-prevention-diagn...
- November 2025: Scotland believes it has identified and is treating 85% of chronic sufferers: https://publichealthscotland.scot/publications/surveillance-...
- January 2021: Northern Ireland doesn't publish stats, but has a 2021-2025 plan (there's no 2026- plan issued as far as I know) https://www.health-ni.gov.uk/publications/northern-ireland-h...
I wouldn't have assumed this really because really the whole point of devolution is that they get to choose what to prioritise, so perhaps the other nations choose to do something they consider to be more pressing for their populations.
Yeah... but there aren't any borders really.
Indeed but there are still different decision makers and sets of voters electing them.
I don't know if borders matter much in this case. It's approximately just as easy to travel to England from many other countries as it is to travel to England from the rest of the UK.
It is a lot harder to travel into England from outside of the United Kingdom than it is to travel from England to Scotland or Wales. For one, I do not need a passport to get on a train to Scotland. Nor do I need a visa.
But you most likely have a passport, and most (western/european) countries have "automatic" visas to the UK, so for the most part, training from London to Edinburgh isn't much easier than Paris to London. Sure there is no passport control, but UK passport control is typically just scan your passport's chip and look at a camera.
I work with people who actively chose to go to conference in Berlin instead of the UK due to visa issues. The passport control is a real issue one cannot just handwave away.
It's quicker to travel to London from Paris and Calais than it is from parts of Scotland. Even though much of the UK's infrastructure acts as a feeder into London. No, we don't need passports but some people in London seem to have the idea that it's just down the road from us, which it isn't.
If you want to get to Glasgow from Campbelltown it can take you as long as three hours for example, and that's before you hit the motorway. Trying to get from west Sutherland to London is worse. Trying to get there from the Hebrides or Northen Isles even more so.
LOL, no that's simply not true.
The borders between Scotland, England, and Wales are effectively like state borders in the US. Unless you see a street sign, you wouldn't know you crossed it.
NI is physically on a different island, so requires a boat or plane ride.
And all of the UK (ignoring the territories and ex-colonies) is on islands. And require a valid passport, passing through customs/immigration checks, and either a plane, boat, or train ride.
Most of the Scottish border is fairly physically obvious, unlike Wales (although the Severn bridge is).
Tens of thousands of people live on islands other than Britain and Ireland. Much of Scotland is not even considered UK mainland by delivery firms, even major places such as Perth.
Given that Great Britain is an island, it is still much easier to drive down the M6/A74(M) or take a hike around the Welsh borders than say, take a flight or swim.
It can be quicker to reach southern England from continental Europe than from Northern Ireland or many parts of Scotland. Or the Isle of Man (which I'm well aware is a Crown Dependency.)
The UK consists of a number of islands. We have hundreds in Scotland with tens of thousands of people living on the other ones. England and Wales have significant ones such as the Isle of Wight, Ynys Môn and Lindisfarne. The IOW has at least 100,000 on it.
What? No it's not just as easy, especially since Brexit now there are real border issues compared to driving down the road.
Each country also has their own Public Health bodies, so pretty much everything related to health is devolved
Yes, that's what I said - each is named "NHS [country]" (National Health Service [England | Scotland | etc]).
Makes me wonder if this project is the reason for a slight downturn in Liver cancer from 2019 forward in the UK.
https://crukcancerintelligence.shinyapps.io/CancerStatsDataH...
Wait is England a country or nation?
Good for you. We get explosive diarrhea as the prize in the States. Wanna trade?
Nah we are good - We have our problems (including our own version of your guy but he hasn't won yet and is currently running against a man with a bin on his head) but on the whole, nah we are good.
Well, then, we can offer you measles, instead. How's that? We're also working on bringing back polio and smallpox. Think of it as our contribution to FREEDOM!
Farage isn't quite the same and of course the situation is rather different.
The three jobs are divided up differently, though still between too few people. You have a Figurehead, the Head of State, which here is King Charles and in the US is Donald Trump. That's the part Trump most likes, you get free gold stuff, you're allowed to do whatever you please, everybody is supposed to suck up to you, hooray. Farage would not get that job.
Next you've got Executive leader. Trump doesn't enjoy this as much. People keep trying to blame him for the fact he's bad at it. He appointed people he saw on TV to run things, how is it his fault they're not brilliant? This would be half of Farage's job as Prime Minister and he likes being asked to account for his incompetence even less than Trump.
Finally Head of the Legislature, in the US this isn't Trump's job, Mike Johnson is in the House and John Thune in the Senate. Farage would get this job in full as the Prime Minister. Even before he resigned he was rarely actually in Westminster, it's boring and you need to be good at actual politics, so of course he's not there, he gets paid more to be somewhere else.
I also don't think Nigel can put together the numbers. Trump has Mike and John to try to make the numbers work, and Farage wouldn't have that. "My way or the highway" is what Farage would say, and that doesn't make the numbers work. That's how you lose a Confidence motion and you're back on your arse in six weeks.
[Edited to correct the Senate leader, mistake pointed out by ragnese below]
Good explanation. Just one correction: John Thune is the Senate majority leader (so, the "head" of the Senate). Steve Scalise is in the House and he's the head of the Republican party in the House, whereas Mike Johnson (who is also a Republican) is the House majority leader (so the head of the whole House, not just his party).
So, it's Mike Johnson for the House and John Thune for the Senate.
Thanks, fixed.
For a second, I thought Hepatitis C was some 1980s C dialect that had memory safety issues.
You're thinking of Objective Chlamydia, I believe.
Introducing: Hepatitis C++
We eliminated TB too. Then it came back.
TB?
Trigger me, thought you meant Tony Blair for a minute!
Second paraggraph:
> The target of treating 80% of all known cases has already been met, and deaths from the virus have fallen by 36% in the last decade, just short of what is needed by 2030.
What is needed by 2030? There is no mention prior to this statement.
Later:
> NHS England says that since 2015, more than 100,000 people have been diagnosed and treated for hepatitis C, meaning the country is already meeting that target.
Again, what target are we talking about??
Much later:
> Prof Frankie Swords, NHS national medical director, added: "England is now leading the world in the mission to eliminate this disease and on course to beat the WHO's 2030 target, but we are determined to keep up the momentum and finish the job.
Finally a target!
FUCK AI
This isn't written by AI, this is just how BBC news articles are written. I find it frustrating too.
I think you are partially correct. They trained AI on their articles to produce the same style articles. I am not a large consumer of BBC articles. This style of snippet after snippet is annoying. Perhaps that is why I am not a large consumer of BBC articles.
> Style Assist helps BBC journalists quickly adapt trusted content into BBC News house style, speeding up the publication of high-quality local stories. It uses a BBC-trained AI model to generate a draft, which is always reviewed and edited by journalists before publication. This helps save time while maintaining accuracy, tone and editorial standards. Find out more in an article from Rhodri Talfan Davies.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/reports/policies/what-were...
Style Assist is mainly for articles written by journalists that are employed by third-party news organisations (who own the UK's local news outlets) but are subsidised by the BBC - these people are "local democracy reporters".
LDRS articles are made free to everyone in the scheme (including the BBC), but because the content is written primarily for their home news org the articles that end up being published by the BBC need to be modified to comply with the BBC's editorial guidelines and for style reasons.
Hence, Style Assist.
I see. Journalism is much more nuanced than I had imagined. The article I linked mentions there are 1,200 rules in the BBC News style guide!
Good news for England.
Thanks to RFKjr and friends, we know what country will be one of the last to do so. Or even worse, the US could end up being a reservoir for HepC.
My reading of the article was aggressive response by single payer healthcare (i.e. NHS) is responsible so that would be almost impossible politically in USA as long as senate exists on top of non scientific medical authorities.
The Senate? He just issued an executive order overriding all science. It's a total farce at this point.
That's true, I was recollecting when we had somewhat ordinary politics in USA and Affordable Care Act passed when Democrats had majority in Senate but making it single payer was stopped by purported Democrat Joe Leiberman.
Care to elaborate?
What has RFK Jr specifically said for/against HepC?
I think the OP is extrapolating from the rise in measles cases under RFK Jr’s expert leadership
Let OP explain xirself.
As you seem to be someone rushing out to defend RFKjr - what are some good things about him? What don’t you like?
I have zero idea about who RFK Jr is or what it does, aside from being the US Secretary of Health, a country of which I am neither a citizen or resident.
Trump just issued an order reducing childhood vaccines, plus there is a Hep C vaccine which is being ignored by the CDC. Never mind the resurgence of many childhood diseases thanks to RFK jr and Trump.
I do not know why some people think the current US regime will follow England with all evidence pointing to doing the exact opposite.
Honestly, Mehmet Oz deserves more of the blame here. He and the other people who are fighting to make healthcare expensive and inaccessible create situations where people aren't being diagnosed and cured of Hep C, which leaves them passing the infection to others through sexual contact, sharing needles, etc.
RFK Jr. is an anti-vax crackpot, but Hep C isn't vaccine-preventable. On the other hand, we can absolutely blame RFK Jr. for our rising Hep A, B, and D rates.
So will it be replaced by Hepatitis Rust for memory safety? (I'm sorry, and I'll see myself out, thanks)
Take your upvote...not happy about it....but here
How can there not be a single sentence in that article HOW IS IT TREATED
If it requires a vaccine you can be sure HEP C will be kept alive and well via MAHA in the US
okay here is a much better article
* https://www.england.nhs.uk/2026/08/100000-people-receive-tre...
> "Treatment involves a free course of antiviral tablets lasting 8 to 12 weeks, which cures more than 95% of cases."
must be nice to have a government that actually cares about its citizens health, we're still waiting DECADES for that Republican health care plan (other than "just die quietly")
Not sure if they edited the article after you read it but this is the 3rd paragraph now:
“Taking antiviral tablets for 8 to 12 weeks can cure more than 95% of cases.”
You take antivirals orally. There is no vaccine that I'm aware of. I got Hep C from a blood transfusion in the 80s and waited decades without symptoms for modern antivirals before finally getting treated.
Now everyone is migrating to hepatitis Rust
Literally nothing in the article points to it being eliminated, only reaching a target of diagnosing 90% of the cases, which doesn't do anything to eliminate it when a large number of cases comes from drug users which are unlikely to care very much about it.
> The target of treating 80% of all known cases has already been met, and deaths from the virus have fallen by 36% in the last decade, just short of what is needed by 2030. Taking antiviral tablets for 8 to 12 weeks can cure more than 95% of cases.
So indeed diagnosing the cases is leading directly to deaths prevented.
> So indeed diagnosing the cases is leading directly to deaths prevented.
This is not what the title claims. The title claims that hepatitis C is to be eliminated, aka 0%. This is not possible; anyone with a basic 101 virology knows why. BBC lies here via the title.
You seem to think there is some kind of conspiracy at play. The BBC is simply using the terminology used by the professionals who deal with this.
Elimination doesn't mean there are no incidences of it, it means no new cases diagnosed in England. This is a result of reducing the cases so much that the chance of catching it drops to virtually zero. Drug users have a range of cleaner alternatives today than 10 years ago so is less of an issue but also if very few people have it, the chance of a drug user sharing a needle with someone who has becomes very small indeed.
Elimination means 0%. If BBC wants to convey something else, they should use other statements. The title insinuates this.
> Drug users have a range of
The title does not even mention drug users.
The title refers to the hepatitis C virus. That virus existed way before drug users did.
It's just legalise phrasing, still a good news. Saldy we lost measles eradication status, and tuberculosis might be lost as well soon.
The title shows a lack of understanding. BBC has become really low quality.
What do you mean by this? The article quotes an NHS director backing up the statement in the title.
> England is now leading the world in the mission to eliminate this disease and on course to beat the WHO's 2030 target, but we are determined to keep up the momentum and finish the job.
Seems fairly unambiguous to me
My brain kept reading Erlang and I was pretty confusing
This is actually a good idea for a HN dataset toy: replace all plausibly confusable words in HN headlines with the names of programming languages.
To be fair Erlang is written in Erlang and before that Prolog, so the Erlang community may indeed view C as Hepatitis.
Just to understand this: When someone says "country England", do they mean "country" like in "nation", considering England a separate nation, or is it a lapse and they mean UK? Is England usually referred to as a country, or just part of a country?
I usually think of a country as equal to a nation, and as far as I know, Wales and Scotland have not split off yet? Is the term "country" not actually that sharply defined?
EDIT: Thanks people, I just asked a question to better understand the terminology, you know ...
In this case it's health related and each of the countries in the UK have their own National Health Services (or Health and Social Care in NI). It's not a lapse here.
I kind of assumed that they actually meant UK. It's indeed confusing. I'd wish the BBC would use a consistent naming scheme.
Guess only England was meant. That would insinuate they don't care about scotland though.
I don't understand. It's an article about England. They only have information to hand about England, from the authority tasked with dealing with health in England.
If I read an article from them about crime in London, quoting the Metropolitan Police, I don't immediately think that they don't care about, say, the West Midlands.
The BBC do use a consistent naming scheme, you're just not understanding the scheme. Scotland has their own devolved NHS, and track their own health statistics. Scotland not being mentioned is because the Hepatitis C Trust were talking about England's Hep C numbers, it wasn't an intentional slight on Scotland.
Confusingly the proper term for England, Scotland, Wales, and NI is country individually, the UK is a country of countries. They should probably be called states but they never have been, I'd pretty much always assume when someone says England to become the first country... that they mean England exclusively.
The bit that gets me is that people often refer to the UK but actually mean GB or vice versa.
When I've heard the distinction (often in a historical context), 'nation' is usually meant to mean a set of people in a place with some sense of collective identity or origin, while 'state' is the governing body which has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence within well defined borders. When these overlap the result is a nation-state, but they don't always line up so nearly. Using those definitions England, Wales, and Scotland are nations. Ireland (including northern Ireland) could also be called a nation (though, of course, as should be obvious by the fact that this does not line up with the borders of the state, this is a contentious topic). The United Kingdom is the state (and of course Ireland-minus-northern-ireland is also a state). 'Country' as a term generally doesn't imply either of these (it's just a name for some chunk of land, notionally), though it's often synonymous with the nation-state when the borders all actually line up neatly, as opposed to in the UK.
Some of the confusion here is from our history. This is my (likely confused) understanding:
James VI/I (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_VI_and_I) was king of _both_ England and Scotland and only later did the Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Union combine the two. You might notice I've neglected Wales which was (considered?) part of England.
In any case, England is a country, yes. Also the UK is a country.
CGP Grey: The United Kingdom Explained (2015) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNu8XDBSn10
A lot of powers are devolved away from England to each other country in the UK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devolution_in_the_United_Kingd...
England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland are constituent countries in a larger country called the United Kingdom. When dealing with international affairs, you typically want to be talking about the UK (unless the subject is sport), as that is the sovereign state. But for domestic affairs, it’s often split in ways that are confusing if you don’t understand various bits of history stretching back about a thousand years.
For instance, England and Wales share a legal system, but Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own. There’s bunch of special things about Northern Ireland and its relation to Ireland. And all of the constituent countries have their own parliament / assembly except for England (the parliament in London is for the whole of the UK where MPs for all constituent countries can vote).
In this particular case, the constituent countries have their own health systems, so it’s normally England we would be talking about, not the UK.
England is the country, part of the United Kingdom. Kingdom being the key word there, the US is a collection of countries ruled by the crown.
The commonwealth is also a collection of countries ruled by the crown; but it's not a country whereas the UK is a country.
Wales and Scotland are separate countries to England.
England is a country, and if you're reading this on the BBC they most certainly are using the correct terminology.
It is not a sovereign country, but instead is a part of the constituents comprising the UK state.
OK, so now we have the following terms: State, nation, country, sovereign country.
For example in Germany one would say there are 16 states, but one wouldn't say that there are 16 countries. Never heard anyone claim that. So state seems to be different from country, at least here. Would people in the UK say that Scotland or Wales are "nations"? Or is at least that term very clearly only for units that could participate under a flag in lets say the olympics? (I assume here, that Scotland and Wales are not separately competing, but are under UK flag.)
"And by 'country' we mean a sovereign state that is a member of the UN in its own right" to quote the famous UK Quiz Show "Pointless".
Team GB enters the Olympics but as you may have noticed it was England who came Third in the World Cup recently, and likewise England play international rugby, including against Wales and Scotland.
>and likewise England play international rugby, including against Wales and Scotland.
Except when they play as part of the British & Irish Lions!
The UK, crown dependencies and overseas territories compete as Great Britain in the Olympics rather than the UK. Northern Irish folks can compete for Ireland or GB.
As an English person I would say that Scotland and Wales are nations and countries; constituent countries of the country that is the UK.
Yeah England is a country. Like what else do we have the name “England” for? We talk a lot more about England than some non-country geography like Anatolia (Asian Turkey). For example there was no UK in the World Cup, but England made it quite far.
If that’s a bit eccentric, well this is the same place that refers to Europe as a different place even though France borders the UK by automobile road.
To make things worse, sometimes team GB competes :) (Edit: in other sports)
England is a country. The UK is a country.
People in the UK would refer to England as a country and most people would actually be confused if you referred to the UK as a country, even though it technically is. People in England don’t really think of the UK as anything other than “the UK”. People from Scotland, Wales, and Ireland have more nuanced takes.
No one is confused if you can the UK a country, or if you call England, Wales, or Scotland a country.
You might get a tedious person saying something like "actually, Wales is a principality".
I must admit I've never heard NI being called a country... wouldn't be the UK if there wasn't some horrible complication involved.
Maybe not in isolation, but if you call the UK and England both countries in the same conversation you’re going to be met with confusion.
Maybe...? I mean not anyone I know but i'm in the UK to be fair.
It's like if you put four boxes in a box, it's not too confusing that the outer box is still a box.
I would be confused if someone called Wales a country. I thought Wales (unlike Scotland) was a region of England and had little autonomy. TIL.
I'm English and I don't think England or Scotland or Wales are countries. People get confused because of football and rugby. They're nations. The country is the United Kingdom.
England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are constituent countries of the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom is also a country. You can disagree, but you're disagreeing with the government and the international community.
Scotland, Wales, and NI have their own parliaments at least, so from a constitutional perspective one could argue England is not a country but a state, but that is only one narrow definition.
Not a problem, I disagree with the government all the time. Scotland has less sovereignty than US states, it's not a country.
The UK seems fairly relaxed about constituent parts leaving (Scotland was given a referendum, NI has option to leave if they want) - which I don't believe applies to US states?
Scotland's referendum, and its parliament, were gifted by the UK Gov, they don't have any unilateral rights.
US states can't secede unilaterally either (any more!), but at least they have a right to their own leadership and militia to do something about it.
Not for long, we have no idea who comes into the country and half our nurses had someone else take their exams.