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Ed Yeates ReportingFifty to sixty thousand people in Utah have an infection and most - probably 90 percent - don't even know they have it. While many were infected as long as 30 years ago symptoms are just now showing up.
It's like reading an insidious mystery. Imagine trying to read that mystery. You check out the book only to find the pages at the end are missing. You never find out when it happened or who did it!
Kathy Stay is in her 30's, only to find out she contracted a virus a long time ago. When and how, nobody knows for sure.
Doctors told Tim O'Rourke he had picked up the virus probably when he was only 18-years old.
Tim O'Rourke, Victim: "I was devastated. I went back to work and closed my office door and cried."
The list goes on, including people like Mick Worthen and Bruce Hatch who need to see health care workers all the time.
Bruce Hatch, Victim: "The problem with the disease is it sneaks up on you. Twenty or 30 years, you don't notice you are losing energy and that you're getting anemic and fatigued, when it's just one day at a time."
A lot of people some 30 years later are just finding out they have Hepatitis C, now considered the number one blood borne virus in the world. Amber Jarrett says symptoms are often vague and overlooked.
Amber Jarrett: "People tend to dismiss the symptoms as just stress or a busy life."
Twenty five percent of those infected get rid of it on their own, but 75 percent don't.
Tim's not a smoker, nor a drinker, doesn't shoot drugs. He has a family and a good job, and yet, Hep C suddenly triggered inside his body, and he now needs a liver transplant to survive. He tires easily, often using the lunch hour to take a nap in his car. Like Bruce Hatch, the virus attacked without warning.
Amber Jarrett, Salt Lake Valley Health Department: "It's not unusual for somebody to actually get diagnosed and already have cirrhosis and have no symptoms."
Where and when did all these folks get infected? Thirty years ago it could have been contaminated mass immunizations in the military. Bruce Hatch was in Vietnam.
Bruce Hatch: "Kind of an assembly line injections that they would give you, kind of like cattle going down the chute."
Tim was also in Vietnam, during the cleanup at the end of the war.
Tim: "Every time we landed on a tarmac or any given base in Thailand or whatever, some medic would come up and wouldn't let us off the plane until we got all the series of injections."
And for Kathy, it could have been when she was a baby.
Kathy Stay, Victim: "I had a transfusion as a baby, and Hep C can be dormant for approximately 30 years."
People you wouldn't consider high risk for Hep C have it and are getting sick. That's why support groups are calling for more widespread routine screening and testing.
