Hepatitis C and American War Veterans

The Untied States has a history of brave soldiers fighting for their country’s freedom and the freedom of others around the world. But wars cost lives. Over the last sixty years, since the Second World War, tens of thousands of brave American soldiers have died, and thousands more have returned to the Untied States suffering from injuries that have been anything from minor and painful but not long lasting to wounds that were completely disabling. Along the way many of them brought home with them the Hepatitis C virus.

The wars that were fought before the 1992 screening process for tainted blood was perfected meant that way too many soldiers had blood transfusions in which tainted blood was unknowingly used. This was not only a problem for the soldier but for the medics, doctors and nurses as well. Veterans are the single largest group of Hepatitis C sufferers in the Untied States today. In the general population you will find that fewer than two percent of Americans are infected with the virus. On the other hand ten percent of all war veterans have the Hepatitis C virus. That is five times the national average.

It is worse for those who were in the earlier wars, before the testing improved the chances that the blood a soldier received was clean and disease free. Of the soldiers who came back from Vietnam just over sixty two percent have Hepatitis C. Looking at the soldiers who were in the army after the Vietnam War but before any major conflict, they have an eighteen percent infection rate. Those from the Korean War and post-Korean war period each have slightly more than a four percent infection rate. The current armed forces veterans, anyone who has fought in the first Gulf war to the present day, show an infection rate of just fewer than three percent. This is a huge difference from the soldiers who served in Vietnam. How terrible that these brave people should wind up with this terrible infection because of wounds suffered during a war in the service of their country. Of three hundred and twenty five thousand veterans tested between 1998 and 2000 the results on sixty five thousand of them were positive, that’s twenty percent of the test group.

Medics became infected when they were treating wounded soldiers in the fields. Think of the horrifying possibility of one medic who treats a solider with Hepatitis C, hands covered in blood the medic spends that rest of the day treating countless wounded spreading a disease that they were not even aware was there. How many times did this happen? Even the doctors, wearing gloves while operating in mobile hospital units, could not prevent blood spraying.

Statistics tell us that in an average hour of every average day three people will day from Hepatitis C or an illness connected to it. Of these deaths two of the three are people with backgrounds in the military. How unfair this is to these brave people.