Hepatitis C (HCV), a virus that attacks the liver, typically strikes people in their twenties and thirties, although symptoms often don't appear until years, even decades, later.

Currently some one million women are affected.

Symtoms are either nonexistent or so vague-fatigue, aches, loss of appitite or abdominal discomfort, that they can easily be overlooked or mistaken for other ailments.
Relatively little was known about the virus until recently.

Prior to 1992, when a reliable screening test for the nation's blood supply was developed, HCV-tainted blood was unwittingly used in some transfusions.

Amazingly, thousands of women who had cesarean sections during that time may not even know they had transfusions, much less that infected blood may have been involved!

The Society for Women's Health Research (SWHR),in Washington, D.C., reports
that before 1992, only 25% of women who recieved blood during C-sections were told about it afterward!
The organization estimates that up to 250,000 American women may hace contracted HCV this way.

Unfortunately, the disease may be harder to detect in women.(Harvard medical school clinical instructor of gastroenterology) "Women are more likely to have little or no elevation of liver enzymes in a standard blood test." As a result,doctors may not order a test for HCV.
Missing the diagnosis can be dangerous as HCV kills 10,000 Americans, (1/3 of them women) annually, a number that may triple over the next twenty years.