Thanks.
I understand now.
Your assumption is correct. No ones genetic make up has anything to do with the viral strain. If someone's exposed to geno 1b then that's the strain they will have with a chronic infection.
Let me make the question a bit easier to answer.
Did my physiological makeup, before I had come in contact with the hepatitis C virus, include a part of me that is genotype 1b?
My assumption is that the Virus is genotype 1b and that my genetic makeup before the virus entered me did not include a genotype 1b designation.
So what hrsepwrgy is saying is you're an eagle genotype (1). And your an
American Bald subtype (b). I like that explanation.
The virus
Genotypes Explained
It is much easier to talk of the Hepatitis C virus as if it is a single organism but in fact it is a range of viruses, similar enough to be called Hepatitis C virus, yet different enough to be classified into subgroups.
Viruses are microscopic and no person could ever see them with the naked eye. Indeed, HCV is so small that there's been no confirmed actual sighting of it using any type of microscope yet developed.
Consequently, a better way to understand the terms HCV 'genotypes' and 'subtypes' is to compare them to things that we can more readily relate to.
Genotypes
The group of birds we call 'raptors' (birds of prey) have evolved into different main types. Imagining raptors as being Hepatitis C viruses, you could take one major raptor type, such as eagles, and imagine these as being one of HCV's main types (genotypes).
Subtypes
But eagles as a group are made up of different sub types such as the American Bald Eagle and Australia's Wedge Tailed Eagle and Sea Eagle. You could imagine each of these as being one of the HCV subtypes that make up an HCV genotype.
http://www.hepatitis-central.com/hcv/genotype/explained.html