However, the Monash Health gastroenterology and hepatology unit director said stigma remained for people with viral hepatitis, and innovative ways of treating all patients were required to help reduce the spread of the virus.

Hepatitis C is spread by blood-to-blood contact and can lead to a lifelong illness that attacks the liver.

Professor Sievert said treatments had vastly improved for the more than 230,000 Australians living with hepatitis C with increasing numbers of the medical community able to help stop its spread.

“We have now these new drugs that are well-tolerated, and people take them for 12 or 24 weeks, and the cure rates are 90 to 100 per cent,” he said.

“So by increasing the number of people who can treat we can do that, so every physician can treat, gastroenterologists, infectious disease doctors, really everyone can do it, and the really important thing is that general practitioners can do it as well. The more health professionals who are treating it, the more likely they are or the sooner we are likely to eliminate hepatitis.”

Professor Sievert said hepatitis was highly curable and said it was a shame stigma still surrounded the illness.

Prevention was also a large part of the fight against hepatitis, Professor Sievert said, with researchers advocating for greater access to opioid substitution therapy and needle and syringe exchanges.

“It’s unfortunately a thing that still impacts on patients and impacts on doctors as well, so there’s this worry that people who have hepatitis C, because of injecting drug use they’re going to have chaotic lifestyles, but it’s really not true,” he said.

“From a public health point of view it makes no sense to discriminate against people who inject.”

Professor Sievert delivered the Dare Shott lecture for the Clifford Craig Medical Research Trust on Tuesday.