 Media Credit: rkm.com.au Above is the Hepatitis C Virus (HCV). Reports have shown that the majority of the infected population are baby boomers.
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Despite affecting 1 percent of the population, hepatitis C remains a disease generally misunderstood by the general public with little in financial commitments from the federal government. The CDC's National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, Sexually Transmitted Diseases, and Tuberculosis Prevention had a budget of almost $1 billion for 2008. Only 2 percent of that was allocated to hepatitis B and hepatitis C despite both viruses being five times more prevalent than the rest. According to the CDC Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is the most common chronic bloodborne infection in the United States.
Now, a newly-published Institute of Medicine Report on hepatitis B and C underscores how this lack of understanding and attention has played out. Although the risk factors for hepatitis C are widely known and completely preventable, the Institute of Medicine (IOxM) estimates that between 2.7 million and 3.9 million Americans have contracted HCV.
This number in itself is worrying but the most startling statistic about HCV is not its prevalence, but the population it affects. The reports indicate that two-thirds of those infected with the virus are Baby Boomers. For some, Woodstock is a distant memory from their youth where they may have experimented with intravenous drugs. Now they are adults in their 50s or 60s and HCV, which is transferred by contact with infected blood, has a particularly long incubation period, often 20 or 30 years. That means that the side effects of one drug use in the 1970s could start to show up in the next couple of years.
A large part of the problem with curbing HCV's prevalence is that most of these persons are chronically infected and might not be aware of their infection because they are not clinically ill. Infected persons serve as a source of transmission to others and are at risk for chronic liver disease or other HCV-related chronic diseases during the first two or more decades following initial infection. In reality, population-based studies indicate that 40% of chronic liver disease is HCV-related, resulting in an estimated 8,000-10,000 deaths each year (CDC, unpublished data). Furthermore, HCV-associated end-stage liver disease is the most frequent indication for liver transplantation among adults.
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