Safe sex and treatment of infected newborns is also reducing the impact of hepatitis. In contrast, about 85 percent of adults infected with the hepatitis C virus become chronic carriers and are at risk for the long-term complications of cirrhosis and hepatocellular cancer. Since such a large percentage of infected people become carriers, the carrier rate in the U. S. is now estimated at about 1.8 percent and climbing. One can only catch hepatitis C from the body fluids of a person who is infected with it. Until the development of blood tests, transmission of hepatitis C was mostly by transfusion of blood and blood products.
Most transmission now occurs among IV-drug users.
This rather low rate of transmission was further reduced by regularly giving gamma globulin shots to the uninfected partners. None of the newly infected partners regularly used condoms and all of the couples had been partners for many years. Researchers speculate that transmission occurred only when the amount of virus in the blood of the originally infected partner rose over time. Hepatitis C typically takes more than 20 years to damage the liver sufficiently enough to produce cirrhosis or liver cancer. Injections of interferon alone were used for a few years to treat hepatitis C, but a rather disappointing cure rate of only about 20 percent was achieved.