There have been cases of transmission through sharing of razors or sharing straws to inhale drugs nasally.
For example, your birth date alone may put you at a higher risk.
Healthcare professionals and members of the military are also at greater risk.
10 Surprising Reasons Youre at Risk of Hepatitis C
How Is Hepatitis C Diagnosed?
If the result is negative, it means youve never had HCV in your blood.
If the result is positive, you were exposed to HCV at some point.
An image showing a healthy liver and a liver affected by chronic hepatitis C with cirrhosis.
There are qualitative HCV RNA tests and quantitative ones.
Your doctor may conduct other blood tests to assess liver damage.
Prognosis of Hepatitis C
Because hepatitis C is treatable, the prognosis is generally good.
Duration of Hepatitis C
Hepatitis C comes in two forms: acute and chronic.
Chronic hepatitis C can lead to hepatitis C-related complications, includingchronic liver disease, cirrhosis, and liver cancer.
This involved weekly injections of the pegylated interferons along with twice-daily oral doses of ribavirin.
Sometimes, interferon was prescribed without ribavirin.
The painful injections often made patients feel ill withflu-like symptoms.
Some of these drugs may be used in combination with ribavirin.
Check with your doctor before taking any medication or supplements that might also damage the liver.
A vaccine for hepatitis C is not yet available.
If HCV-related cirrhosis has led to liver failure, a liver transplant is the only real treatment.
People with cirrhosis have an increased risk for liver cancer.
Cirrhosis also increases the risk for liver cancer.
How Many People Have Hepatitis C?
The CDC put the real number of acute hepatitis C cases in 2019 at an estimated 57,500.
There were 15,713 reported deaths related to HCV in 2018, but this is likely a conservative estimate.
HCV may be causing 3 to 5 times more deaths than we know, Branch says.
Better information about the number of HCV-related deaths would help make HCV testing and treatment more of a priority.
you could only gethepatitis Dif you already have hepatitis B. Joseph Bennington-Castro is a science writer based in Hawaii.
