precautions

Do you need to worry about infecting people with your blood if you have completed 48 weeks of HCV treatment and  blood test show SVR? Can you still infect others?

[portann]

Speaking as a novice and non-scientist, I don't see how you could infect others with HCV if there is no HCV in your blood, unless you relapsed.

Given the stigma, though, it seems inevitable that there are on-the-ground worries all around, whatever the facts. The legal and scientific implications on the one hand and people's deep-seated reservations on the other are not the same thing.

I'd exercise caution in general about blood-to-blood contact, since cross- infection, whatever the cause, is a reality of life. Identification, diagnosis and treatment have only ever played catch-up to any disease.

To think that the height of being cool little girls in my time was to become blood sisters, secretly pricking our fingers and diligently, so diligently, mixing our blood together.  

[nygirl7]

You can't infect someone with something you do not have.  Still - I would always be careful with blood to blood contact not only to infect someone else but because who need to be reinfected with this disease and have to treat all over again!

[proud48]

I saw a surgeon last week and I told him I had completed the 48 weeks of tx and was SVR and he said "there is no cure for HCV and I would be putting everyone at risk in the OR". I felt so embarrassed and dirty. Just have to get over it and put it out of my mind.

[portann]

That's stigma, playing hardball, unless the law or operating room protocol states otherwise. How awful for you. It's what we all fear we'll encounter in the 'real' world.

That surgeon doesn't even know the as yet undiagnosed infections he himself has but that doesn't stop him from getting his hands into body cavities. Surgeons and dentists are probably prime candidates for spreading a hundred and one infections to their patients.

[Bobby1952]

   That surgeon is an idiot. There is a cure for HCV and if you are SVR you are cured. Tell him to ask a hepatoligist about what he said to you. I could go on and on. What a moron.

Bobby

[merryBe]

I think it's a split theology right now. Obviously people who are intimate for 30 years usually don't catch HCV from their partner who has it, One can only assume there might have been a few abberrent cells transferred in all that undiagnosed time, so either the other body simply deal with it through the immune system, or something. If the amount was small enough, it might not even result in an anti-body positive reaction in the mate.
That's not to say bleeding into a patient would be a good thing. the question at the point of SVR is could any of the few virions still around be viable anough to transfer. Are the mutated beyond contageion, or are they still a low infection that can be passed.

this is why I think the NGI test >1  virion is appropriate for health workers.
read up on HR's thread on PCR testing , click on the heath pages up top right.
also read up on occult virus thread there. This is why the verdict is still out.
There are studies suggesting we carry it on, like we do chicken pox...
the question of whether we carry a contageous form is where contention still lies.
mb

[meki]

READ THROUGH MY 1 million questions to DR D...

AND HIS ANSWERS.


http://www.medhelp.org/posts/show/537424

I had the same question.

Now --- here's what I believe:

NO.

I THINK ONLY blood INJECTED can cause infection.

YOUR SURGEON who stated that should be REPORTED.

Meki

[jmjm530]

As a nurse you probably know that "idiot" and "surgeon" are often synonymous. Given this is your living,  I'd get a lawyer and decide what action is appropriate.