Education by peers is the key to success

We are a Latino, a white guy and an African American, and we are all peer educators in the hepatitis C programme at Organization to Achieve Solutions in Substance Abuse, Inc. (OASIS), a not-for-profit medical clinic in Oakland, California. We are all recovering heroin users who got hepatitis C from using needles and we all managed to stop using drugs. In the same way, we all went through hepatitis C treatment; one of us was a sustained responder, one a non-responder, and one a relapsing non-responder who is still on maintenance interferon. We have written this paper to tell our story. We believe that good education about hepatitis C encourages people to take better care of themselves, get tested and treated when necessary, and can motivate them to cut down or stop using drugs. In short, we use hepatitis C to encourage people to get their lives together. Many of the people we have educated go out to the community and educate other people who need it. We invite others to join our struggle, because we never thought we would make it this far.