Living with Hepititus C

Hello Paul,

Sorry that you're dealing with this disease. It is indeed devastating. As you know, hepatitis C is spread via re-use of needles, blood transfusions, sexual contact, or direct contact with other bodily fluids.

It is hard for me to imagine that injections that you would have received in the military would have been responsible for you contracting hepatitis C. Basically, this could ONLY have happened if they were reusing needles, or some component of the injection material that was coming in direct contact with one patient's bodily fluid (blood) and then being transferred to another patient. While we certainly hadn't identified hepatitis C thirty years ago, we were most certainly aware of the dangers of reusing anything that came in to direct contact with bodily fluids.

However, I suppose anything is possible. But before you decide that that is how you were infected, you'd really need to rule out other possibilities: ANY sexual partners that might have been untrue with you? EVER used someone else's needle for anything? EVER had a blood transfusion, or any other kind of blood product (plasma, platelets, cryoprecipitate) transfused into you? Ever had surgery of ANY sort?

The other thing is, if indeed that was the method you contracted the hepatitis (and again, I find it very hard to believe), others should have suffered the same fate, presumably.

I hope all of that helps. I know it's not a hard and fast answer, but what you're proposing seems unlikely to me. Hopefully you'll find the source, although I don't imagine it will much change the management of your disease now. Good luck.

Thank you for your response but why I asked about air injected innoculations was there were times that the airman before you moved of flinched and the injection caused the airman before you to bleed and I was concerned with that. Thank you so much for your help and any other answers you can give me.

Sincerely,
Paul Blalock

Hmm.

I see what you're saying.

Unfortunately, I don't know much about the kind of system you're referring to. I assume that they would still change needles, but I think what you're saying is that a bit of blood might have made its way into the mechanism of the injector, and then would have had the possibility for entry into your own bloodstream, when you subsequently were injected. The virus itself is not an "airborne" virus, like cold viruses. It HAS to be transmitted via fluids, so traces of blood that was infected would have to have been in the apparatus and then have to have been injected into you, or at least been mixed with whatever was being injected into you.

I suppose that that's possible. Now, if you've ruled out all other possible places for you to have acquired the disease, this may be it. HOWEVER, your quest for answers may end around here. For you to try and figure out exactly what the system was that was used, and then to possibly address the manufacturer, or the government themselves, or to try and contact others who may have been infected at that time... obviously, if you were able to prove it (and of course, finding others like you with the disease who were in the same place as you at that time is probably as close as you'd get), you could argue that the government owes you a bit more money than they're probably giving you now.

But that burden of proof is so enormous... and you're talking about records and such from 30+ years ago, and many of your comrades may, in fact, have died of other causes since then, or may have been lucky enough not to have contracted hepatitis C...

Like I said before, good luck.