A new study says "Yes".
The Canadian study mentioned by Mauilady (see the thread "New study on HepC: no more "stigma.", below, for the URL) doesn't just remove the stigma previously attached to HCV-infected baby-boomers but puts it squarely on the shoulders of the medical profession, whose improperly administered blood transfusions and insufficiently sterilized hypodermic syringes and other injection and transfusion apparatuses are specifically named as the principal causes of the spread of HCV after WWII.
For decades the medical profession has been placing the blame for the HCV epidemic in North America onto its main victims, the baby-boomers, who in the 1950s and 1960s engaged in experimentation with consciousness-expanding drugs, and who in their later years have become the medical profession's sharpest critics.
Never has the deceitful game of "blame the victim" been more ugly, since it now turns out that the blamers themselves are the real cause.
Is it too big a leap from this new finding to imagine that the doctors who transfused infected blood and injected with infected syringes had at least a suspicion of what they were doing? After all, isn't the pharmaceutical industry, whose profits from HCV treatment drugs are in the billions of dollars, those very doctors' main source of income?
But, no. That's unthinkable. Isn't it?
M.