What is hepatitis C anyway?
Hepatitis means inflammation of the liver. The liver is a vital part of the body. If it does not work properly it can cause serious illness or sometimes even death. The liver breaks down waste products in your blood. When the liver is inflamed, it doesn’t do a good job of getting rid of waste products. A visible sign of the build up of waste products is jaundice, or going yellow. Hepatitis can be caused by many things: drinking too much alcohol or taking certain medicines, for example. Many viruses can cause hepatitis, too. Hepatitis C is a blood-borne virus — that is it lives and spreads in blood. Hepatitis C is the most prevalent liver disease in the world. It is often called the ‘silent’ epidemic because someone can be infected for decades before the infection is discovered. Hepatitis C emerged at the beginning of the 1960s and since then has been associated with blood transfusions and injecting drug use. The extent of the problem only became clear after 1990 when reliable hepatitis
