There are commonly sold flammable refrigerant things now in the USA, I see a bunch of small fridges using alkanes and cycloalkanes, not sure about HVAC.
if you have a good butcher they might be able to get you some that you can render, but its a hassle. I've done this for beef fat to make some british pie things.
You take antivirals orally. There is no vaccine that I'm aware of. I got Hep C from a blood transfusion in the 80s and waited decades without symptoms for modern antivirals before finally getting treated.
> I got Hep C from a blood transfusion in the 80s...
Same here! I had one symptom -intermittent somewhat abnormal liver enzyme results- that was very easy to explain away with the fact that I'm nearly always somewhat dehydrated because I have trouble forcing myself to drink enough water. I had to run into a doc who was in the habit of running the test "just in case" because she had seen a ton of Hep C cases before the culprit was discovered.
Honestly, I'm really glad I didn't get diagnosed much earlier than I did... it's my understanding that interferon treatment is really awful to go through and has like a 50% success rate for Hep C infections. When I got diagnosed Harvoni was quite new, but it worked on the strain I had, and there were absolutely no side effects that I noticed. Its list price was shockingly expensive (something like 150k USD) but that's way cheaper than a new liver and -as is often the case with these sorts of things- financial "wizardry" meant that I paid like 5 USD.
I was young (got the transfusion just after I was born) but I understand that my parents got notified of the possible/likely infection based on that batch of blood leading to other infected patients, then I got tested and was positive. There was a class action lawsuit that paid for the otherwise very expensive treatment (I was treated 10 years ago). My doctor given my lack of symptoms for many years discouraged the interferon treatment anticipating that better drugs would be coming. He was right and I was treated without side effects before I ever had symptoms.
Overall, I agree, when I ask things I'm an expert in and do professionally every day. I get very good useful answers. When, for example, our marketing people, ask about the science, they often get confusing and wrong answers.
As long as there is money people will come just for that. That's where we got tech bros, like finance bros, instead of just a bunch of nerds making cool stuff.
Really? How many fridges have you gone through in 10 years? This might be the way you treat things, because for me and mine all of these are still a single digit: 1.
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