Innate immunity in type C hepatitis

Abstract

As early as the days of Hippocrates, hepatitis has been described as a disease that occurs in the young and shows the cardinal symptom of jaundice, which sometimes develops into a critical condition. Ironically, research on hepatitis progressed rapidly duringWorld War II because injuries and the terrible sanitary conditions of the battlefields caused serious hepatitis epidemics. People recognized that hepatitis could be classified into two types: infectious and serumal. The former became known as hepatitis A and the latter as hepatitis B. After the war, the hunt for hepatitis viruses had begun. First, the hepatitis B virus (HBV) was identified in 1967 by Blumberg, who was awarded a Nobel Prize in recognition of his discovery. Next, the hepatitis A virus (HAV) was discovered in 1973. These discoveries were thought to have clarified the causes of hepatitis, but by the following year, it was acknowledged that many cases of hepatitis were not caused by either HAV or HBV (Prince et al., 1974). Later, the hepatitis D virus (HDV) and the hepatitis E virus (HEV) were discovered in 1977 and 1983, respectively, but they were not the cause of hepatitis non-A, non-B, which is associated with blood transfusion. In 1989, HCV was identified by a molecular biological method where researchers induced the expression of cDNAs obtained from the blood plasma of a chimpanzee with hepatitis non-A, non-B and screened them with convalescent serum (Choo et al., 1989). HCV was the first virus to be discovered not by the previously used virological methods, but by a molecular biological method. © 2008 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.