Medicosnext
Once upon a time, getting a blood transfusion was a highly a risky affair, because some people receiving donated blood were apt to get chronic hepatitis (liver inflammation) from an unknown, mysterious disease. And, although the Hepatitis A and Hepatitis B viruses were discovered by the mid-1960s, in 1972, Prof. Harvey Alter of the US National Institutes of Health found that patients were still getting sick after receiving donated blood, which he referred to as “non-A, non-B” hepatitis.
In 1989, British scientist Prof. Michael Houghton managed to isolate the genetic sequence of the virus and it was named Hepatitis C. In 1997, another US scientist, Prof. Charles Rice, injected a genetically engineered Hepatitis C virus into the liver of chimpanzees and showed that this could lead to hepatitis. On October 5, 2020, the three scientists— Harvey Alter, Michael Houghton, and Charles Rice—were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of the virus, which is a common cause of liver cancer and a major reason for liver transplant. Currently, there are 70 million people infected with the Hepatitis C virus, which kills around 400,000 a year.
