By Matthew Hill BBC Health Correspondent

A treatment which is already helping hepatitis sufferers in Scotland should be made available in England and Wales as well, says a leading doctor.

The drug, called pegylated interferon alfa-2b (Viraferon peg), can help clear the hepatitis C virus from many infected patients.

However, while the drug has won approval for use in the Scottish NHS, it has only just been referred to the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE), which carries out appraisals for the NHS in England and Wales.

There seems to be a lack of government will in responding to this epidemic

Nigel Hughes, British Liver Trust

This means that it will be at least 17 months before it can give the go-ahead for the drug to be funded.

While it is licensed for use across the UK, the drug combination recommended in Scotland costs �12,000 a year, and many English health authorities do not pay for it.

Instead, patients here are given another combination of drugs, which may not be as likely to succeed.

Wait and see

Liver specialists are angry - accusing the Department of Health of dragging its heels.

Nigel Hughes, from the British Liver Trust, told the BBC: "There seems to be a lack of government will in responding to this epidemic.

"Here, the government wants to wait 30 years to see if people will actually live or die with the virus."

Thousands of cases

Hepatitis C has been described as an "approaching epidemic" - and unlike hepatitis A and B, there is no vaccine against it.

In some patients, long-term infection can cause liver cirrhosis, which can prove fatal.

Tens of thousands of people are expected to die from the virus in the next ten years.

Dr Christopher Tibbs, from the Queen Mary Hospital in Roehampton, said: "If patients go on to develop cirrhosis they have an increased risk of dying from cancer, bleeding from the gut or liver failure."

In tests, Viraferon peg cleared the virus from between 54% and 61% of patients.

NICE was created to remove the so-called "postcode lottery", in which neighbouring health authorities might have different policies on funding different drugs and treatments.

However, there appears to be increasing divergence between Scotland and the rest of the NHS.

For example, in Scotland, the leukaemia drug Glivec is available, while a preliminary verdict from NICE suggests that it could be restricted to fewer patients in England and Wales.

A spokesman for the Department of Health denied that it was stalling to save money - but said that NICE had to prioritise because it had a backlog of drugs to appraise.