By: Nour Hany
Imagine living in a time when blood transmission is your biggest fear in the world! In the 1960s, donating blood was more like a “Russian Roulette” game; people were more likely to get liver inflammation from donated blood caused by a mysterious disease.
At the time, Hepatitis C was an unknown disease; Hepatitis A and Hepatitis B were only discovered by the mid-1960s. However, in 1972, Prof. Harvey Alter discovered that none of these viruses was causing liver inflammation for the patients who received the blood and that another mysterious disease was causing the inflammation. After giving chimpanzees blood from infected patients, these chimpanzees started developing the disease. Later on, this mysterious disease became known as “non-A, non-B” hepatitis, and scientists started putting a plan to figure out its nature.
Back then, scientists had limited resources and tools, which made their searching strategy for the virus really hard. After seven years, and more than 30 or 40 different methodological approaches, one of these approaches finally worked, leading to the discovery of Hepatitis C. The Nobel Prize for medicine or physiology was given to the three scientists who discovered it: British scientist Michael Houghton, and US researchers Harvey Alter and Charles Rice.
Their discovery contributed to saving millions of lives, as it is now possible to detect the virus in the blood, preventing millions of people from getting infected and raising awareness of the disease all over the world. If it were not for this discovery, we would not have discovered a cure for the virus, and it would still be one of the most terrifying diseases in the world.
Although it is now officially a curable disease, 70 million people are still living with the virus, and it kills about 400,000 a year.
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