723 - The White House's Initiative to Eliminate Hepatitis C
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 21 February 2024
⏱️ 15 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Deadly hepatitis C is curable, but 2.5 million Americans remain infected without treatment. Dr. Francis Collins, longtime director of the National Institutes of Health, is now serving as a special advisor to Present Biden for an effort to eliminate hepatitis C in the US. He speaks with Stephanie Desmon about why hepatitis C has been so tricky to diagnose and treat and what it will take to launch a coordinated effort to cure every American living with the disease.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, |
| 0:05.9 | where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges. |
| 0:16.3 | If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health question at jhh.edu. |
| 0:23.8 | That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:32.2 | This is Lindsay Smith Rogers. |
| 0:34.5 | Today, Stephanie Desmond talks to Dr. Francis Collins, the longtime director of the |
| 0:39.3 | National Institutes of Health, about his most recent mission to eliminate hepatitis C in the U.S. |
| 0:46.1 | They discuss how it can be done and, more importantly, why. Let's listen. |
| 0:52.4 | Dr. Francis Collins, thanks so much for joining me. |
| 0:55.2 | I'm glad to be with you on this podcast. |
| 0:58.3 | So today I'd like to talk to you about what you've been doing since you left the NIH, |
| 1:03.8 | and I understand you are leading a White House initiative to end hepatitis C. |
| 1:08.8 | Can you talk to me about how that came about? Pretty bold, huh? So yeah, |
| 1:14.9 | I stepped down as NIH director in December of 2021, thinking I was going to have, you know, a 22 |
| 1:20.5 | year where I could have sort of a sabbatical, think great thoughts, come up with some ideas about my |
| 1:27.4 | research lab. |
| 1:28.8 | That lasted about six weeks, and then I got called by the White House and asked to come and be |
| 1:34.0 | the president's acting science advisor, which was pretty exciting opportunity, although it was |
| 1:40.2 | also pretty intense. |
| 1:42.2 | But one of the things you can do in that situation is to look across the |
| 1:45.4 | entire government investments in science and health and medicine and say, are there some things |
| 1:50.3 | here that are really ready to go, but they haven't quite been pulled together? And as I looked at the |
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