Abstract
This manuscript provides a literature review of prevalence and routes of hepatitis C virus
transmission, and prevention methods regarding its prevalence in different populations.
There is a great difference in the frequency of hepatitis C virus infection of general population
versus injection drug users. Even in developing countries with unsafe therapeutic injections
and contaminated blood, the rate of disease is higher in injecting drug usere. A literature
review of published scientific reports on HCV epidemiology, prevalence, and its relation to
addiction in some countries was performed. While different epidemiologic patterns of HCV
infection exist with seroprevalence of 0.4% to 1.1% and 9.6% to 20% in general population
in North America and some countries of North Africa; respectively, the frequency of HCV
infection in injection drug users is 48% to 90%. Injection drug use seems the most important
worldwide risk factor for hepatitis C virus infection. Substance abuse, HCV infection and
mental illness frequently coexist and complicate HCV treatment. Implementing effective
measures for preventing injecting drug use by effective drug education programs in school,
research in behavioral/environmental addiction predispositions, implement strict drug abuse
policy, regular estimation of addiction patterns, and to model prevention approaches according
to every certain situation is necessary.
Keywords
Hepatitis C virus Global prevalence Transmission intravenous drug use
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Copyright
© 2010, Author(s). This open-access article is available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which allows for unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original work is properly cited.