After decades of Hepatitis C claims that there is no viable treatment, other than the regularly prescribed antiviral medication, Johnson and Johnson has come up with a drug to inhibit and eliminate Hep C altogether.

Johnson & Johnson calls the drug Olysio, which was created to eliminate the hepatitus C virus.

Hep C is the most common form of the virus known to destroy the liver in those who have been infected.

Olysio is the third FDA-approved protease inhibitor for treatment of hepatitis C, the FDA said.

This comes as great news to those more than 3 million people, in the U.S. alone, who have this disease. Hep C takes the life of more than 15,000 people a year.

The most effected are the “baby boomers“, born between 1945 and 1965. The reasoning is that back in the day, those wild and crazy baby boomers were sharing sex freely, as well as needles during that ever popular time – The 60’s.

But we can’t blame everything on this virus in the 60’s – some people contracted Hep C by blood transfusion – prior to 1992, which is when the blood banks began testing for this deadly virus. Anyone could have gotten it from tainted blood prior.

For more than two decades, the barely effective treatment involved very difficult regimines of pills and injections of the two most used antiviral drugs ribavirin and interferon-alpha. The side effects were harsh, making the patient feel flu-like, with nausea, diarrhea and achy all over.

The studies the FDA received for the new Olysio drug promises to be more effective, curing more than 80 percent of patients never treated previously, and cutting the treatment down to 6 months instead of a year, as well as lowering the nasty side effects.

Another bonus is that Olysio only need be taken once a day, instead of up to 12 pills a day with the current Merck and Vertex drug offerings.

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