Baby boomers urged to get hepatitis C test

We know you’re busy. But, if you can carve out a moment, government health officials have a teensy favor to ask of you.

Could you please visit your doctor, sooner rather than later, and get a hepatitis C test?

It was in 2012 that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that everybody born from 1945 to 1965 — that means you, baby boomers — undergo a one-time screening for hepatitis C.

What’s behind the odd, seemingly scattershot recommendation?

First, says Brian Labus, senior epidemiologist for the Southern Nevada Health District, it’s the fact that hepatitis C is “one of those diseases that people can have without even knowing it.”

“We know that about 3 million people in the U.S. have the disease, but up to 75 percent of them don’t know it because, sometimes, there are no symptoms, so you don’t see problems until it’s done a lot of damage,” he says. “And, in the end, you might die from it.”

Hepatitis C is caused by infection with the hepatitis C virus.

Most people who get it develop a chronic, lifelong infection that, left untreated, can result in cirrhosis, liver cancer and other liver diseases, according to the CDC. In fact, the agency notes, hepatitis C is the leading reason that liver transplants are done.

But here’s the weird thing: While anybody can contract hepatitis C, persons born between 1945 and 1965 are “five times more likely to be infected,” Labus says.

According to the CDC, it’s suspected that most boomers who have hepatitis C were infected with it during the ’70s and ’80s, perhaps through the use of intravenous drugs, because hepatitis C is spread primarily via contact with an infected person’s blood.

But also, Labus says, it wasn’t until 1992 that the U.S. had an effective screening test for hepatitis C in donated blood, making transfusions before then another potential way for boomers to have contracted it then without knowing it now.

Anyway, it’s believed that the boomer population is “the largest group that has been exposed” to hepatitis C, Labus says, and the reason the CDC recommends that anyone born from 1945 to 1965 to receive a one-time hepatitis C screening.

On the upside, “it’s just another blood test,” Labus says.

“The idea is, the next time someone comes in for a physical and they have to draw blood anyway, check the (hepatitis C) box.”

Note, too, that “this recommendation is for the providers as much as the patients,” Labus says.

“We want providers to do tests for this, we want patients to ask for it, and we want providers to ask their patients to be tested for it.”