Universal opt-out screening for hepatitis C virus (HCV) within correctional facilities is an effective intervention to improve public health.

Purpose Worldwide efforts to identify individuals infected with the hepatitis C virus (HCV) focus almost exclusively on community healthcare systems, thereby failing to reach high-risk populations and those with poor access to primary care. In the USA, community-based HCV testing policies and guidelines overlook correctional facilities, where HCV rates are believed to be as high as 40 percent. This is a missed opportunity: more than ten million Americans move through correctional facilities each year.

When security and medicine missions conflict: confidentiality in prison settings.

Purpose - It is a simple fact that prisons cannot exist - practically, legally, ethically or morally - without the support of physicians and other health professionals. Access to adequate healthcare is one of the fundamental measures of the legitimacy of a jail or prison. At the same time, there is a fundamental tension in the missions of the prison and doctor.

Advancing Medical Professionalism in US Military Detainee Treatment.

Leonard Rubenstein and colleagues argue that professional associations should ensure that military rules do not require health professionals to choose between service to their country and ethical practice.

How health care reform can transform the health of criminal justice-involved individuals.

Provisions of the Affordable Care Act offer new opportunities to apply a public health and medical perspective to the complex relationship between involvement in the criminal justice system and the existence of fundamental health disparities. Incarceration can cause harm to individual and community health, but prisons and jails also hold enormous potential to play an active and beneficial role in the health care system and, ultimately, to improving health. Traditionally, incarcerated populations have been incorrectly viewed as isolated and self-contained communities with only peripheral importance to the public health at large.

Incarceration, community health, and racial disparities.

Several recent studies have shown that the racial disparities in U.S. mortality nearly disappear in prisons.

Physicians in US Prisons in the Era of Mass Incarceration.

The United States leads the world in creating prisoners, incarcerating one in 100 adults and housing 25% of the world's prisoners. Since the 1976, the US Supreme Court ruling that mandated health care for inmates, doctors have been an integral part of the correctional system. Yet conditions within corrections are not infrequently in direct conflict with optimal patient care, particularly for those suffering from mental illness and addiction.

Treatment outcomes with pegylated interferon and ribavirin for male prisoners with chronic hepatitis C.

Goals: To report our experience with pegylated interferon and ribavirin treatment of hepatitis C virus (HCV) RNA-positive inmates at the Rhode Island Department of Corrections.

Background: An estimated 1 out of 3 HCV-infected individuals will spend time in a jail or prison within a 1-year period, making prisons a unique setting for management of chronic HCV.

Study: Chart review of all inmates identified as having initiated HCV treatment between October 2000 and April 2004.

Deaths of detainees in the custody of US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2002 to 2005.

In light of the large number of detainees who continue to be taken and held in US custody in settings with limited judicial or public oversight, deaths of detainees warrant scrutiny. We have undertaken the task of reviewing all known detainee deaths between 2002 and early 2005 based on reports available in the public domain. Using documents obtained from the Department of Defense through a Freedom of Information Act request, combined with a review of anecdotal published press accounts, 112 cases of death of detainees in United States custody (105 in Iraq, 7 in Afghanistan) during the period from 2002 to early 2005 were identified.

Opportunities to address the hepatitis C epidemic in the correctional setting.

An estimated 15%-40% of incarcerated persons in the United States are infected with hepatitis C virus (HCV). Approximately 1.4 million HCV-infected persons pass through the corrections system annually, accounting for one-third of the total number of HCV-infected persons in the United States.

Treatment of chronic hepatitis C in a state correctional facility.

Background: Approximately 1 in 4 of the nearly 2 million individuals in state and federal correctional facilities are infected with hepatitis C virus (HCV). Currently, there are few reports of treatment outcomes of this common infection in this setting.

Objective: To describe HCV therapy in the incarcerated setting.