Ms Nicola Perry:

On the evident disparity between the two statements, one is the position of the national hepatitis treatment programme and its feeling we are on track. As Mr. Keane rightly said, that was 2020, even though the programme asserted it again earlier this year. The other one is international research done on modelling data. Essentially, they look at things like incidences of disease, screening of disease, treatment rates and then from that they extrapolate what the outcome looks like. To note something quite clear - and I am aware I am talking about the period under Covid - in 2020 the treatment programme treated 532 people. Also in 2020, we had 326 new notifications of people becoming newly infected or newly tested. My maths is not brilliant but I did it earlier and we cleared 206 people off the table, if you like. If you look at the same figure for 2021 we took 179 off the rate. You can compare that against the idea, which is well-researched in the absence of a full screening programme, which is not financially viable, that we know we have somewhere between 20,000 to 30,000 people living with untreated hepatitis C in Ireland today. If we are looking at an elimination date of 2030 and you look at those figures - I know of course under Covid they would be higher - as you would be looking at us having eight years, you probably need to be treating a minimum of 3,000 people per year just to make that target. Without it becoming a sort of he-said-she-said piece, if we look at how many notifications we get, how many we are treating and compare them against our understanding of the numbers here, then that gives us a slightly different picture than that we are on target.