Hepatitis C: The Insidious Spread of a Killer Virus

This stealthy disease can incubate for decades. Now thousands of people are getting sick. By 2010 it may strike down more Americans each year than AIDS

By Geoffrey Cowley

NEWSWEEK-April 22, 2002 issue

Merrily Anderson was an actuary’s dream when her life-insurance policy came up for renewal three years ago. At 50 years old, she had enjoyed good health and a happy marriage all her adult life.

THERE WAS NO ILLNESS in her family. Her job was stable, and her lovely twin daughters had just turned 21. When the insurance agent suggested applying for a discounted rate, she supplied urine and blood samples and figured she was a shoo-in. She wasn’t. When the agent called back, he said the whole application had been nixed, and suggested she write the company to ask why. Anderson dashed off a note before leaving on a brief vacation with her husband, and the answer was lodged in a stack of mail when they got home. It said, policy denied: hepatitis C.

Hepatitis what? few of us would know HCV from KFC. Yet this potentially lethal virus is now four times as widespread as HIV, and few of the nation’s 3 million to 4 million carriers have any idea they’re infected. HCV, or hepatitis C virus, was not even discovered until 1988. And by the time scientists developed tests that could spot the pathogen, it had spread silently for decades. IV drug users were infected by the hundreds of thousands. So were people like Anderson, who received two pints of blood while giving birth in 1977. “Hepatitis C mirrors America,” says Alan Brownstein of the American Liver Foundation. “It affects bus drivers, construction workers, even soccer moms.”

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