Health Information Fundamentals Practice Hit170

Hepatitis

There are several types of hepatitis. For example: hepatitis A, hepatitis B, and hepatitis C. They all affect the body differently.

Hepatitis A was founded by Dr. Saul Krugman, a New York pediatrician in 1956. (A.D.A.M.) Dr. Krugman went to Willow brook state school in Staten Island to help them. Willow brook is a home that is overcrowded with four thousand mentally disabled children. (A.D.A.M.) He had children with hepatitis and other infectious diseases staying at the school. He experimented on the children by injecting and feeding them with infected blood. Krugman discovered hepatitis A and hepatitis B in the 1960s. (A.D.A.M.)

In 1963 Baruch Blumberg, a geneticist at New York’s Columbia medical school, found that the blood of some hemophilia patients contained antibodies. He also found that the blood reacted with an antigen in the serum of an Australian aborigine. (A.D.A.M.) Blumberg called it the Australia antigen, which is known today as hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg), and he was able to show that it is a marker of hepatitis B virus. (A.D.A.M.)

Laboratory tests became available to find hepatitis A and hepatitis B in 1975. However, it was understood in seventy-five percent of cases that HAV and HBV did not cause post-transfusion hepatitis. (A.D.A.M.) Non-A and non-B hepatitis is mostly caused by hepatitis C (HCV). In Hepatitis C Virus, one finds that it was only after the application of molecular cloning techniques to the plasma of chimpanzees infected with non-A, non-B hepatitis that the HCV genome was finally identified in 1989. (A.D.A.M.) Hepatitis A, B, and C differ in many ways.

Inflammation of the liver caused by the hepatitis A virus is known as hepatitis A. Some symptoms are loss of appetite, fever, abdominal pain, jaundice, diarrhea, nausea, and fatigue. The first week of symptoms or the week before the symptoms occur the person that is infected can spread the virus. The virus can spread even if the infected person has...