Martin Phillipps Photo: Supplied
Since his death last week tributes have flowed for Martin Phillipps, and while his influence on New Zealand and the wider international music scene has been at the forefront of those tributes, his openness about living with hepatitis C has also been acknowledged.
It is estimated there are more than 50,000 people in New Zealand with the hepatitis C virus, with only half currently diagnosed with the blood-borne disease that causes inflammation of the liver, and can result in liver damage and liver cancer.
Tuari Potiki, chairperson of the NZ Drug Foundation, and previously the first Māori chairperson of the New Zealand Needle Exchange, told RNZ's Nights "for a lot of us he's a champion."
"He told his story, he owned it, a big part of The Chills movie is about that journey that he took towards clearing himself of hep C.
"So, he was a champion. He stood up, he told the world what he was doing and the treatment that he was having and the reasons why he needed it."
Much stigma remains associated with hep C, he said.
"There's a lot of stigma around it and he shone some light on that. For a lot of us, he's a champion."
The most common way to catch hep C is through needles, Potiki said.
"So, injecting, usually people by saying that they have hep C are essentially admitting to having used intravenous drugs. And there's obviously still incredible stigma around drug use, not just in this country, but around the world, but particularly here in New Zealand, I think because we are so much smaller, we're much more of a village."
Declaring "that sort of stuff is very scary", he said.
"Connecting those dots back to drug use puts people's livelihoods in jeopardy."
The disease is not easily transmittable, he said.
"It's not transmittable, for instance, through a cough or a sneeze, you can't catch it off someone unless, basically, you share blood with them."
Potiki who himself has hep C was an intravenous drug user during the 1980s.
"It wasn't until I started working as an alcohol and drug counsellor, which was sort of six or seven years later in the mid-90s I noticed all these people I was working with going and having these tests for hep C, and they were all coming back positive."
Someone advised him to get tested, he said.
"I went and had the test, and I had it. Firstly, I was told that I would die with it, not of it. So, when I was told that I had hep C, the severity of it was downplayed."
Later, after attending an overseas conference on hep C, he realised the disease was more severe than he had been told.
"I came back to New Zealand from that conference and went straight in and had a test. And sure enough, mine had got a hell of a lot worse in the intervening years, to the point my liver was nearly cirrhotic."
Treatment options back then had brutal side effects, he said.
"It was 48 weeks of taking 18 pills a day, plus injections, and which was almost like a low dose chemo. And it was horrific.
"It was for me. They actually stopped providing that treatment because it was too brutal, too many people were giving up because of the side effects like teeth falling out and hair falling out."
The new treatment is basically side effect free, he said.
"Three months of one pill a day and for about 98 percent of people, they kill it."
He urges anyone who "had a bit of a wild ride" in the late 70s through to the 90s to get tested.
"I'm not talking about people who ended up life-long drug heads. I'm talking about people who just maybe had had a wild night, or had a time in their lives, maybe where they went out a bit and partied a bit more than they would now."
Even you were around at that time but not particularly involved with drugs, the test is simple, he said.
"Basically, we encourage everybody, if you think you may have been exposed, particularly if you had times when the memory of the night before has been a bit foggy."
