STD: HOW IS HEPATITIS C TRANSMITTED?
Hepatitis C is most often transmitted through contact with infected blood. Persons at especially high risk for hepatitis C infection are injection drug users, hemodialysis patients, and anyone who received multiple blood transfusions before 1990 (as did many people who have hemophilia). About 90 percent of posttransfusion hepatitis was caused by hepatitis C before the blood supply began to be screened for the disease in 1990. It is estimated that up to one out of every ten people who received a transfusion in the 1970s and 1980s was infected with hepatitis C. Since screening has been put in place, however, transfusion-related hepatitis has become rare.
Sharing needles in injection drug use poses a high risk of transmission. Tattooing with an unclean needle can also transmit hepatitis C. The chances of becoming infected from a needle-stick injury are estimated to be between 3.5 and 10 percent.
There is some debate about how easily hepatitis C can be transmitted sexually, although hepatitis B and HIV are almost certainly easier to transmit sexually than hepatitis C. Recent studies, however, indicate that sexual transmission of hepatitis C may be easier than was previously thought. Semen and vaginal secretions carry sufficient quantities of the virus for transmission. The risk increases with the duration of the relationship, and male-to-female transmission is more effective than female-to-male, as with most of the viral STDs. Transmission among same-sex couples has not been adequately studied. Those who have multiple sexual partners have a higher risk for hepatitis C infection than those with fewer partners. Combining these research findings with the fact that it is still unclear through which means many people infected with hepatitis C became infected, we must assume that sexual transmission is a possibility and that it may play a more important role than previously thought in the spread of the disease.
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