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MIAMI (Reuters) - Grammy-award winning Cuban-American singer Jon Secada added his spoken sound on Thursday to a growing general health campaign to raise awareness of inveterate hepatitis C infection.

Secada, 50, revealed that his fore~ died last November from complications associated through hepatitis C, after failing to follow proper medical treatment for many years and conformity the disease a secret, even from house members.

Secada is joining forces by the American Liver Foundation in a campaign 'Tune in to Hep C,' backed through fellow singers Gregg Allman of The Allman Brothers and Natalie Cole, 62, the daughter of jazz fiction Nat King Cole.

Cole had a life-preserving liver transplant in 2009 after she was advanced with the disease, the legacy of deaden with narcotics abuse in her earlier life.

Secada hopes speaking out about his family's continued can help break a taboo attached to the indisposition and encourage greater understanding about its risks, he told Reuters in each interview.

"My father chose not to make known anyone about his disease for a protracted time, and he chose not to take spontaneous process against it for reasons I may at no time understand," he said. "By the time he was proficient to explore any aggressive medications it was overmuch late."

Secada does not know by what mode his father contracted the virus, which began to affect his health surrounding eight years ago. His father, Jose Secada, was a national prisoner in Cuba for three years in the 1960s and left the isle with his family in 1970.

"Before he passed absent, he told me that he wanted me to share his story to help other rabble like him who have chronic hepatitis C end aren't taking action," Secada related.

"Take it from me, you be in want of to talk to your doctor and prattle to your family."

An estimated 3 a thousand thousand to 4 million Americans and 180 very great number people worldwide are infected with hepatitis C, which causes progressive damage to the liver excessively many years. If untreated it have power to lead to cirrhosis, liver cancer and decease. It is also the leading produce of liver transplants.

The virus that causes it is prepare through the blood, typically through shared needles or from hot spark transfusions prior to the early 1990s, while routine screening for the virus became criterion practice.

"That's why we are vision an outbreak of it now. The infant. boomers were more exposed to it," related Dr. Leopoldo Arosemena, an assistant professor of healing art at the University of Miami who specializes in liver dieses.

Others sharp up the virus from sharing razors or needles used in favor of tattoos or intravenous drug use. The last mentioned created the stigma associated with the sickness.

SOCIAL STIGMA

"Many people think that precisely because you have the virus you were doing a portion you shouldn't be doing," reported Arosemena. People automatically think drugs, bound in reality they often got it from sources they trusted, contaminated outfit, tattoos, or other things."

Many don't know they are carrying the illness as it can lay dormant as antidote to decades. A simple blood test be possible to detect the presence of the distemper, which can be successfully treated with a range of new drugs.

"I give advice to everyone in doubt to get assayed," said Arosemena. "By the time it gets to you it potency be too late."

The disease disproportionately affects Hispanics who distinction for almost one third of cases in the United States, directly in part to poor hygiene in clinics and hospital in Latin America, because well as tattoos and drug ill-treat.

"In Latin America it's trite for people to get injected at home through a neighbor with old glass syringes that you gathering and use again," said Arosemena, noting that the hepatitis C venom is resistant to high temperatures.

Last year notable a major advance in the handling of hepatitis C with the approvals in May of sum of ~ units new medicines - Incivek from Vertex Pharmaceuticals and Victrelis from Merck & Co - that overture the promise of far higher remedy rates and the potential for shortened manipulation durations than the previous standard drugs.

Both companies bear sponsored hepatitis C awareness campaigns, and Merck is operating with Secada's campaign.

News of the modern medicines caught the attention of manifold people with hepatitis C who had been putting right hand treatment and Vertex has booked sales in over-indulgence of $950 million just since May.

Prior to the availability of the novel medicines, patients had to take medications that caused flu-like symptoms that left patients sympathetic miserable for nearly the entire duration of the 48-week treatment.

As a determination many patients with the disease - multitude of whom are asymptomatic - would leave off or put off treatment altogether more than deal with the onerous espouse a cause effects.

Meanwhile, excitement is building in spite of the next wave of treatments different companies are working on that are serene a couple of years off bound appear to be highly effective to such a degree far in clinical trials.

He continues to do regularly and recently returned from appearances in Peru, Mexico and Argentina. He brought extinguished a Spanish language album last year, Otra Vez, and has a newly come album due out later this year featuring Cyndi Lauper, being of the cl~s who well as , says he has been tried and does not have the virus.

Born in Cuba, he left the isle when he was 8 and had a fibre of cross-over hits in English and Spanish in the at dawn 1990s before his career dimmed.recording the hymn for a global world peace "super-musical entertainment."

Secada still performs regularly and upright returned from giving concerts in Peru, Mexico and Argentina.

(Reporting By David Adams; Additional reporting ~ dint of. Bill Berkrot; editing by Todd Eastham)

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