Turner received his shot as a sonar technician for the Navy during the Vietnam War. There are about 667,000 veterans living in Washington. Of those, veterans groups say as many as 10 percent may be infected, far higher than the 1.8 percent of the general public carrying the virus. Hepatitis C kills about 10,000 people a year nationally and is the leading reason for liver transplants. Those at highest risk include people who have used intravenous drugs, shared drug paraphernalia, received blood transfusions before 1992, worked in health care or other jobs exposing them to blood, or shared razors or toothbrushes with an infected person.
Sexual contact is a much more rare mode of transmission.
However, in a study of veterans published last year in the American Journal of Gastroenterology, about 11 percent of those who tested positive for hepatitis C had none of those known risk factors. The issue of whether some of that 11 percent could have come from military inoculations is still being debated. 10 injections at once. The high-pressure impact of the gun would cause many recruits to flinch, resulting in a cut. Bleeding was a common occurrence.