
Hepatitis Country
West Virginia has the highest hepatitis C infection rate in the United States, roughly five times the national average, and this film traces the outbreak to the state's opioid crisis. Reporters travel to Huntington to interview people who inject drugs, along with the nurses and health workers trying to slow the spread of a virus most users don't know they're carrying until they've already passed it on through shared needles. The testimonies are blunt: high schoolers injecting on campus, couples reusing bent needles, one man estimating he knows almost no one locally who hasn't been infected. The film follows local health departments running needle exchange programs, controversial in these Bible Belt communities but credited by workers with cutting transmission, even as funding stays thin because of the stigma around addiction. It also looks at the new antiviral drugs that can cure hepatitis C and the price tags that put them out of reach for the people who need them most, tying a rural drug epidemic directly to a national argument over who gets treated.