For the first time, health officials are proposing that all baby boomers get tested for hepatitis C. Anyone born from 1945 to 1965 should get a one-time blood test to see if they have the liver-destroying virus, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in draft recommendations issued Friday.
The often undiagnosed virus is contracted through contact with blood from an infected person. While the risk of infection has dropped dramatically since the early 1990s, many older adults are still at risk, according to the CDC, which released the draft guidelines.
Baby boomers account for 2 million of the 3.2 million Americans infected with the blood-borne virus. The virus can take decades to cause liver damage, and many people don't know they're infected. According to the CDC, one in 30 baby boomers has been infected with hepatitis C.
CDC officials believe the new measure could lead 800,000 more baby boomers to get treatment and could save more than 120,000 lives.
The virus causes serious liver disease, including liver cancer - the fastest-rising cause of cancer-related deaths - and is the leading cause of liver transplants in the United States.
The hepatitis C virus is most commonly spread today through sharing needles to inject drugs. Before widespread screening of blood donations began in 1992, it was also spread through blood transfusions.
Health officials believe hundreds of thousands of new hepatitis C infections were occurring each year in the 1970s and 1980s, most of them in the younger adults of the era — the baby boomers. The hepatitis C virus was first identified in 1989.
In these years.. people has been affected not only by Hepatitis C...but by AIDS too..
ReplyDeleteThere were been a big scandal about blood transfusions, made willingly, for to sell the stock of blood of the bank of blood donations.
"Tainted Blood Case
The contaminated blood scandal is a scandal that affected several countries in the 1980 and 1990 in relation to infections occurring through blood transfusions. Due to security measures ineffective or nonexistent, many people have been infected with the AIDS virus or Hepatitis C through blood transfusions.
The AIDS epidemic has emerged in the 1980s, but it took several years before discovering its modes of transmission and can be screened. In a number of countries, there was a delay between when the problem of HIV transmission through blood has been known and the time action was taken. Several people were infected and many died..... http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affaire_du_sang_contaminé "
Even children with hemophilia were transfused with this blood .. :((
By giving this contaminated blood ... They voluntarily distributed death to thousands of innocent people.. in the world.. :((
My daughter at his birth (in 1980) has been transfused.. I & her have had chance that the blood weren't contamined.. others haven't had it..