THERE’S nothing glamorous about hepatitis C — except that it’s become Miss America 2000’s pet cause.
“When I heard that 8 to 10 percent of veterans before 1992 were [likely to be] infected,” says Kentucky’s Heather French, herself the daughter of a Vietnam vet, “I felt I had to do something.”
French recently visited the VA New York Harbor Health Care System, a hospital and health clinic on East 23rd Street in Manhattan, as part of her campaign against what’s been called “the silent killer.”
Almost impossible to detect without a blood test, hepatitis C is highly contagious and usually transmitted by transfusions and other forms of contact with the blood.
Left untreated, says Dr. Douglas Dieterich, chief of gastroenterology and hepatology at Manhattan’s Cabrini Medical Center, it can lead to liver cancer, cirrhosis or failure of the liver.
“Up until ’91, we didn’t even know what it was,” he says. “We started screening the blood supply for it and found that nearly 2 percent of whose who donated blood had hepatitis C.”
Because of the high rate of transfusions during the Vietnam war (more than 364,000 in two years alone, Dieterich says), the incidence of hep C in veterans is as high as 10 percent — or four or five times that of the general population. But anyone who’s had a transfusion before June 1992 is at risk, he says.
Those infected rarely know they’re ill, since hep C has virtually no symptoms except fatigue, “which all of us have sometimes,” Dieterich says.
The only sure way of detecting the virus is with a “simple, cheap blood test,” says Dieterich, who urges all those at risk for hepatitis C to ask their primary-care physicians to test them for it.
Contaminating someone else is as easy as sharing a razor or toothbrush.
“I can’t count the times I picked up my dad’s razor and used it in the shower,” the reigning Miss America says.
Only at her urging did her father, a former Marine disabled by a gunshot wound, have himself screened. They’ve yet to learn the results, French says.
Once diagnosed, Dieterich says, hepatitis C can be treated with a combination of interferon injections and ribaviran pills. Treatment typically runs a year to 18 months.
And that, contends the reigning Miss America, “is a small price to pay for being able to enjoy the rest of your life.”
