When Karen Robson was about to turn 40 earlier this year, her doctor ordered a battery of tests – including a blood test for hepatitis C. Robson, a Toronto-based sociologist, said she was shocked when the results confirmed that she had antibodies for hepatitis C. “I went into panic mode,” she said.
Robson has no idea how she contracted the virus: She has never received a blood transfusion or medical attention in a foreign country, and never experimented with injection drugs, she said. Doctors suggested there was a slim chance she was infected via dental work or sharing a toothbrush. “If I can get this, anyone can,” she said.
Hepatitis C is sometimes seen as a drug addict’s disease, but recent data suggest the largest group of Canadians carrying the virus consists of average adults born between 1945 and 1975. Last year, evidence of high infection rates among boomers prompted the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to recommend that all adults born between 1945 and 1965 be tested and treated for hepatitis C before this latent disease becomes a health crisis.
That testing guideline was supported by the Canadian Liver Foundation, which expanded the birth year to 1975 “due to the prevalence of hepatitis C in the immigrant population,” said Dr. Morris Sherman, the foundation’s chairman and a liver specialist at Toronto General Hospital.
National health agencies have yet to recommend hepatitis C testing beyond high-risk groups, which include immigrants and active injection drug users. But according to Canadian epidemiologists, hepatitis C is a ticking time bomb. Many predict that without a co-ordinated plan for diagnosis and treatment, large numbers of boomers who have unknowingly carried the virus for decades will develop cirrhosis and liver cancer, or suffer from liver failure.
