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null Mobile apps offer creative strategies to prevent and treat Hepatitis C virus at scale

Dr. Nitika Pant Pai, a clinician-scientist at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC) and Associate Professor of Medicine at McGill, is the developer behind a smartphone app called HIVSmart! which allows for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) self-testing. She has also piloted a similar screening technology that capably detects HIV and hepatitis C co-infection in India, which was highlighted by The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) as a key strategy in preventing the “silent epidemic” that affects 71 million of people worldwide. Many infected people remain asymptomatic and undiagnosed until the disease, a blood-borne infection, progresses and causes liver damage. Dr. Pant Pai's work is so promising that the Canadian Institutes of Health Research is funding another mobile app initiative to help the populations who are infected with hepatitis C across Canada. The EIU is a branch division of The Economist newspaper.

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