HEPATITIS

The liver is the largest internal organ, and one of the most complex. It regulates the amount of sugar, fat, and protein that circulate in your blood. It makes cholesterol, vitamin A, clotting factors, and about a quart of bile a day, which helps digest fats. And it detoxifies your blood, removing drugs, alcohol, and other potentially harmful chemicals so you can eliminate them.
A key compound your liver filters from blood is bilirubin, a breakdown product of old red blood cells. When your liver is healthy, it processes bilirubin, and adds it to bile, which enters the small intestine on its way to elimination. But if your liver is damaged and can’t filter properly, bilirubin builds up in your blood and eventually gets deposited in your skin and eyeballs, turning them yellow. That’s jaundice, a classic sign of liver disease.
Your liver usually purrs along, quietly performing its many critical tasks despite all the noxious drugs and alcohol you send its way. But your liver can also get infected by several viruses. That’s hepatitis. There are six types of viral hepatitis: A, B, C, D, E, and G. But the three main ones are A, B, and C.
Hepatitis A
The bad news is that hepatitis A is the most common viral liver infection in the U.S. The good news is that, in the vast majority of cases, within two months, you heal completely. Hepatitis A spreads through contaminated food or water. Two to three weeks after you get infected, you develop jaundice along with flu-like symptoms, and your urine turns dark because some bile mixes with it.
Hepatitis A is a hazard of travel to areas with poor sanitation. In the U.S., it’s common in daycare center children and staff, and in children age five to 14.
Hepatitis A does not cause cirrhosis, nor does it become chronic.
Hepatitis B
Hepatitis B causes the same symptoms as hepatitis A, but it can last longer, and cause more damage including cirrhosis and liver cancer.
Hepatitis B spreads by blood-to-blood or sexual contact. It’s a major occupational hazard of nurses and other health workers who accidentally get stuck by needles containing contaminated blood. Pregnant women can pass the infection to their babies. And some people are carriers–they don’t develop symptoms, but they’re infected and can spread the disease through blood-to-blood or sexual contact.
About 300,000 cases of hepatitis B are diagnosed each year, and 10 percent of those people become chronic carriers. The younger you are when diagnosed with hepatitis B, the greater your risk of chronic infection. Chronic hepatitis may cause no symptoms. Or you might experience fatigue, loss of appetite, nausea, vomiting, fever, and recurring jaundice. Around 20 percent of people who have had hepatitis B die prematurely from cirrhosis or liver cancer.
Hepatitis C
Only about 10 percent of people infected with hepatitis C develop typical hepatitis symptoms, but an estimated 85 percent become carriers. Within 10 years of infection, about 25 percent of those who have had hepatitis C develop cirrhosis and 10 percent develop liver cancer.
The National Institutes of Health estimates that 4 million Americans now have hepatitis C. An estimated 170,000 new cases are diagnosed each year. And some 9,000 Americans die annually from cirrhosis caused by it. To make matters worse, like AIDS, hepatitis C may not cause symptoms for many years after infection. Today, an estimated 1 million Americans are symptom-free carriers who can spread the infection.
Like hepatitis B, hepatitis C spreads by blood-to-blood contact and sexually.