Now those people are starting to come through with chronic liver disease.”The Government is dragging its feet on this – there is a lack of political will and a fear of the cost implications.”A treatment based on interferon can eliminate hepatitis C from the body, and a new slow-release version was recommended by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence last month. But the virus is symptomless in its early stages, meaning efforts have to be made to test and identify those infected. There is also a shortage of trained nurses able to give the treatment which lasts up to a year.A spokeswoman for the health department said: “The hepatitis C action plan will be published in due course.”. House prices are poised to strengthen during early 2004 after another bumper month in December, with the exception of “cold spots” such as Ealing and Bexley, Nationwide Building Society said yesterday. It was the star turn of this year’s festival, evidence that under Dove’s direction the various Spitalfields events have gained imagination and energy.The six poems in Out of Winter started out as a response to the poems by Thomas Hardy that Benjamin Britten had set in his song collection Winter Words. What Robert Tear and Jonathan Dove came up with for the Spitalfields Winter Festival felt more rooted and vernacular than recitals usually do, but it still had the classical division: first the words, then the music.
All the same, in the classical world the appearance of Tear as singer-poet is surely unique.

You think you’ve heard it all, and then along comes a new experience: poet and composer performing their own song cycle. Before everybody shouts “Lennon and McCartney”, it isn’t the same. Each of that duo sang his own tunes and words, in the age-old, worldwide tradition. Next time they should play at Islington’s Union Chapel – now devoted to world music – where reputations are made, and stars born For Meccio and co are born stars.. His voice has that convivial timbre which moves seamlessly between speech and song, and his manner has winning charm. His violist is superb; his wind-player rings the changes between flute, folk-oboe, and jew’s harp; Meccio himself switches between the Spanish guitar and the guitar battente which has a silvery sweetness in tone.This group are big in Germany, but unknown here.

No fireworks, but a grave and graceful exploration of near-forgotten forms.The next night takes us to Sicily, where Salvatore Meccio – leader of the Tammorra band – presents 19th-century Christmas songs from that island. Italy is rich in young musicologists dedicated to reviving extinct folk forms, and Meccio is one of this movement’s leading lights. And when Troia Nova deploy their minimal armoury of flute, lute, drum, and voice without benefit of amplification, it’s fascinating how the ears respond. For once we are listening, as opposed to defending ourselves against amplified din, as at the South Bank or Barbican; we are active listeners in a way which is quite rare these days. And the music repays this attention: a series of vocal and instrumental pieces from Turkey and Greece, including ecstatic Mevlevi and medieval Hebrew chant.