Hepatitis C, a viral infection, causes serious liver disease, including liver cancer, which is the fastest rising cause of cancer-related deaths. Hepatitis C is the leading cause of liver transplant in the U.S.
Approximately 2 million baby boomers are infected with hepatitis C; they make up about three-quarters of the known cases in the U.S. More than 15,000 baby boomers die from hepatitis C and its complications, including cancer and cirrhosis, every year, and deaths have increased steadily for the last decade.
Current guidelines call only for testing people with certain known risk factors for hepatitis C infection, but many baby boomers don’t consider themselves to be at-risk, and so don’t get tested. But data show that baby boomers are five times more likely to be infected with the disease than other adults.
The infection is spread through contact with infected blood, and the best-known risk factor is sharing needles or other paraphernalia for injection drug use.
Doctors might be reluctant to ask people about their drug use, but there’s another risk factor for hepatitis C: The nation’s blood and tissue banks only began testing for hepatitis, HIV and other infectious diseases in 1992. Anyone who got an organ transplant or blood transfusion before that testing began could have unknowingly contracted the disease, said Tessie Pollock, a spokeswoman for the Ohio Department of Health.
The infection can remain hidden for decades.
When health officials consider implementing widespread screening for any disease, they have to consider several factors, including how invasive the screening is and how much it costs. They also have to consider whether getting an accurate diagnosis will improve an individual’s health or the health of the community at large.
Hepatitis C is diagnosed with a blood test. If a patient tests positive, a doctor will likely order a liver biopsy to determine the extent of liver damage.
One impetus for expanding testing for hepatitis C now is better treatments, said Dr. Thomas Hirchline, medical director of Public Health-Dayton and Montgomery County. Older drugs weren’t very effective against some subtypes of the infection.
Better treatments mean doctors can actually help patients with hepatitis C get better, said Carol Quinter, director of microbiology at Kettering Medical Center. And since people who don’t know they have the disease are more likely to spread it to others, more widespread testing will also likely reduce infection rates, she said.
“It’s really important that we look at these mandates from the perspective of does the test get the job done right of identifying who we want to intervene with, and can we offer the patient who tests positive a process that will improve their overall health? That answer may change from year to year with any given disease state,” she said. “That’s certainly the case with hepatitis C. We do have better testing. We do have better treatments so we can improve the outcome for patients across the nation.”
The CDC estimates that one-time testing of the baby boom generation could identify more than 800,000 additional cases of the disease, prevent costly and disabling liver disease, and save more than 120,000 lives.
The CDC’s draft testing guidelines will be available for public comment through June 8.
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-7457 or peggy.o’farrell@coxinc .com.
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