Amount of Youngsters With Hepatitis C Grows

Nowadays more than 40 percent of young american drug users have Hepatitis C and the amount still keeps on growing. The majority of young people become drug addicted approximately in the age of 17-18. The main reason why so many people from the young generation become positive for Hepatitis C is usage of heroin by sharing non-sterile needles.

Researchers from New Jersey lead a study to find how the amount of people with Hepatitis C is increasing. Researchers had been observing the drug users for more than a year and they concluded  17-36 years old heroin users have Hepatitis C. Scientists from New Jersey started their research after the spread of Hepatitis C by patients on the rehab in Princeton House.

“So just this first quarter of this year now we’ve tested close to six to seven hundred individuals, 40-50 percent of them were positive. That is more patients that we’ve identified than we did in the last couple of years. But we’re testing more. We’ve gotten better at making sure that everybody gets tested. I think that the problem for testing is that it’s a cost, so a lot of clinics are not testing, and we need to be testing so that this silent epidemic is more broadly recognized,”  - commented Dr. Nahass, the president of Infectious Disease Care in New Jersey.