Hello Shnapper,

You seem to be following a common misconception in medicine. In med school they taught it to us in Latin as:

Post hoc ergo propter hoc

The literal translation is “after this, therefore because of this”.

The reason it is taught in medicine is that it’s a logical fallacy which states “Since event Y followed event X, event Y must have been caused by event X.”

While it is true sometimes, ie I give you a medicine, you get a side effect, often it is not true. For example, Bells Palsy was thought to be caused by having a bath and being exposed to a cold draught. Doctors would ask patients “Did you have a draughty bath” and they would say “Yes”. The problem was this was true for a whole lot of people so although one event seemingly followed the other, they were not related.

Anyway, you seem to relate your issues to exposure to a girl and unprotected sex. While you can certainly catch all sorts of diseases from unprotected sex, you are very unlikely to catch Hep C and if you have Hep C we can detect that very very very efficiently with PCR. If your PCR is negative then we (and you) can be confident that is not the cause, and that treatment of Hep C will have no benefit.

So while I have no doubt the problem is exactly as you state it, the cause of the problem is not. Once you can accept that, we can move on to looking for the real cause of the problem…

A complete physical examination and blood tests would be the logical starting place.

Hello Greedfighter,

Great news!

There is a blog post about this here:

https://fixhepc.com/blog/item/115-hep-c-generics-set-to-be-released-in-the-usa-in-2019.html

Hello Kaju,

We have seen your AST and ALT elevated from what sounded like too much exercise. Obviously, your numbers are lower (always good). If they were 20 I would be positive the RNA would come back negative. I expect it will be fine, but you (like me) will have to wait to see the RNA to be 100% positive.

Vororo is 100% correct.

When you are infected you deploy an immune response. As always this is the production of HCV Antibodies, unfortunately, these antibodies only clear the infection in 25% of patients, and the rest go on the have chronic HCV, despite having antibodies to the disease.

This is the main reason an effective vaccine is unlikely – as a group our innate immune response to HCV is poor and most of us produce weak antibodies that are simply not up to the job.

Getting on to reinfection – the DAAs clear the virus you currently have but, as soon as you stop taking them, they wash out of your system within a week (in terms of being at effective levels) and 6 months in terms of leaving even a single molecule.

So although you will still have antibodies to HCV that is all you have, and we know yours are not good enough to clear an infection so… If you are exposed to HCV again, chance are you will be infected again.

So be good. If you can’t be good be careful!

Hello John and Vororo,

I’ve changed the default to search all of the posts, rather than just the last years.

There is a lot of gold in them there ye olde threads!

Thanks for the info beahavan.

With the normal range being around 11-21 that looks like being somethjng to keep an eye on rather than panic about