Here is our brief guide to Hepatitis C

Your second largest organ, after your skin, is the liver.  Your liver takes digested food from your intestines, stores some of the goodness and passes the rest into your bloodstream.

Simply, "hepatitis" means an infection, irritation or inflammation of the liver. There are different types of viral hepatitis, but with all of them, as the virus gets to work, the liver cells are damaged and it's also thought that the immune system gets to work causing more damage by attacking the infected liver cells.  Like HIV, hepatitis viruses replicate quickly once in the body.

The damage caused by hepatitis infection causes scarring of the liver which can then lead to cirrhosis.

Hepatitis C, before it was identified, HCV used to be called "non-A, non-B" hepatitis.

Like Hepatitis B, you can be infected with HCV and have no immediate symptoms.  If you have symptoms, they will be similar to other hepatic conditions, but the most common is fatigue.  20% of people recover and the virus is cleared from their body.  The rest slowly develop chronic infection, taking between 10 and 40 years, but this can be accelerated by other factors like alcohol use ..... or HIV infection. HCV runs a close second to chronic alcoholism as the cause of cirrhosis.

HCV is transmitted easily through use of contaminated needles. It's harder to pick up HCV sexually (people with multiple sex partners, or where sex draws blood, may be more at risk) and mother to baby transmission is estimated between 5 and 7%.  Some studies show that HIV infection can raise the viral load of Hepatitis C in the blood, making those with both viruses more infectious with HCV.

Treatment for HCV includes combination therapies of Interferon injections and Ribavirin capsules, both of which have side effects, and is only offered once a biopsy (small sample taken from your liver) shows moderate to severe liver damage. If you can't have a liver biopsy, doctors will assess the damage by looking at your liver function test results.

The course of injections and capsules lasts between 6 and 12 months and is aimed at clearing the virus from your body, but this only works in between 30 and 40% of cases. For the remainder, treatment may slow the damage caused by reducing viral load. Adherence to this treatment regime plays an important part too.

There is no vaccination against HCV. Liver failure due to HCV is the becoming a leading cause of death in people with HIV.. Studies have shown that HIV worsens HCV infection, people co-infected with HIV and HCV are about twenty times as likely to experience liver failure as individuals infected with HCV alone. There is no indication that HCV infection speeds HIV disease progression.

A factsheet on Hepatitis C is available from NAM by clicking here and links to other websites dealing with Hepatitis C are here

Talk about Hepatitis C co-infection on the discussion board by clicking here