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Stewart Rogers, MD
Moses Cone Hospital Greensboro, NC

JAMA. 1996;276(4):280.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.

—In the Clinical Crossroads article on asymptomatic hepatitis C infection,¹ there seems to be a disjunction between the initial statistics on this epidemic disorder and the main thrust of the management advice. Dr Sorrell states that 3.5 million Americans have chronic hepatitis C while 8000 to 10 000 die of it annually. Even adding in the 1000 annual liver transplants attributed to hepatitis C, the ultimate bad outcome rate is 11000 a year. Even if we assume that the new ability to test blood donations will prevent further accretion to this vast reservoir of cases, in 30 years only 9% of the 3.5 million will develop end-stage disease or hepatoma. This is corroborated by the article by Seeff et al,² which Dr Sorrell cites and then seems to ignore, that shows no effect of non-A, non-B hepatitis on 18-year total mortality and only the slightest . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

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