hepatitis as u would have guess is the inflammation of the liver. up until now, there are a few major hepatitis virus that is recognized but the three main ones are hep A, hep B and hep C. for this discussion i would like to focus more on the hepatitis C.so who gets infected with hep C?
in the old days, people used to get infected via the blood transfusion since few screening programmes were conducted back then. but now, hep c patients are mostly from the intravenous drug abusers, unsafe sexual practice and sometimes through tattooing. as like many other major illness, hep C patients can be divided into acute and chronic patients.
patients who are in their first 6 months post infection are considered acutely infected. most of them are asymptomatic. they however can present with reduce appetite, fatigue, abdominal pain, jaundice, itching and flu like symptoms. but unfortunately, about 70% of the acute patients will then proceed to develop chronic hep C. the complications include that of chronic liver disease such as cirrhosis, liver cancer and portal hypertension. at the moment, the current treatments employed are peginterferon alpha, and ribavirin for a course of 24-48 weeks
