Woops, link fixed (here it is again). That article is part of a dedicated supplement to HCV challenge/CHIM.
Speaking in my personal capacity, I agree — I’d love for insurance/that sort of compensation to be the norm. That does not happen enough in medical research, challenge or otherwise.
I can see why an insurance agency would be very wary. Establishing causation of cancer in general is hard. Even if someone were screened and in perfect liver health during the CHIM, that doesn’t mean they won’t later adopt common habits (e.g. smoking or excessive drinking) that are risk factors for liver cancer.
Relatedly, another article in Clinical Infectious Diseasesreviewed liver cancer risks due to CHIM, concluding that “[a]lthough it is difficult to precisely estimate HCC risk from an HCV CHIM, the data suggest the risk to be very low or negligible.” This was based on analysis of three separate cohorts/datasets of people who had previously been infected with hepatitis C in other contexts. Still, the risk cannot be discounted entirely, and there are risks other than liver cancer that our FAQ document discusses, too.
Perhaps a workaround could be to establish some sort of trust that pays out to any former CHIM participant who develops liver cancer not obviously traceable to something like alcohol abuse disorder, and have this fund liquidate its assets after a certain number of decades. That would be very novel, expensive, and probably legally complicated, and I don’t think it’s been raised before.
Woops, link fixed (here it is again). That article is part of a dedicated supplement to HCV challenge/CHIM.
Speaking in my personal capacity, I agree — I’d love for insurance/that sort of compensation to be the norm. That does not happen enough in medical research, challenge or otherwise.
I can see why an insurance agency would be very wary. Establishing causation of cancer in general is hard. Even if someone were screened and in perfect liver health during the CHIM, that doesn’t mean they won’t later adopt common habits (e.g. smoking or excessive drinking) that are risk factors for liver cancer.
Relatedly, another article in Clinical Infectious Diseases reviewed liver cancer risks due to CHIM, concluding that “[a]lthough it is difficult to precisely estimate HCC risk from an HCV CHIM, the data suggest the risk to be very low or negligible.” This was based on analysis of three separate cohorts/datasets of people who had previously been infected with hepatitis C in other contexts. Still, the risk cannot be discounted entirely, and there are risks other than liver cancer that our FAQ document discusses, too.
Perhaps a workaround could be to establish some sort of trust that pays out to any former CHIM participant who develops liver cancer not obviously traceable to something like alcohol abuse disorder, and have this fund liquidate its assets after a certain number of decades. That would be very novel, expensive, and probably legally complicated, and I don’t think it’s been raised before.