About 10,000 drug-users with hepatitis C have fallen through the health-care 'safety net' because they cannot afford expensive but effective drugs.
The latest estimate, by the University of Hong Kong, shows between 30,000 and 50,000 Hong Kong people have hepatitis C.
Professor Lai Ching-lung, of the university's Department of Medicine, estimates about 25 per cent of carriers are drug addicts thought to have contracted the potentially fatal virus by sharing needles. Half of the patients were infected through blood transfusions and the channel of transmission for the remaining 25 per cent was unknown.
Hepatitis C carriers are at risk of developing cirrhosis and liver cancer after 15 to 20 years.
The news comes as the Hong Kong Liver Foundation yesterday urged people who had blood transfusions before July 1991 to go for blood tests on Sunday at Lok Fu shopping centre.
In 1998, the Hospital Authority launched a programme to test patients who might have been infected with the hepatitis C virus from Red Cross blood transfusions before 1991. But the programme was not extended to drug addicts.
