Hepatitis C is caused by the hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection. According to World Health Organization data, 3% of the world population (approximately 170 million people) is infected with HCV; in Poland there are over 700,000. Over 70% of those infected manifest no symptoms in the acute phase of the disease, and in about 70-80% the acute phase progresses into a chronic form. Patients with sympt...

BACKGROUND Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is a significant problem among patients undergoing maintenance hemodialysis (HD). We conducted a prospective multi-center study to evaluate the effect of dialysis machine separation on the spread of HCV infection. METHODS Twelve randomly selected dialysis centers in Tehran, Iran were randomly divided into two groups; those using dedicated machines ...

To determine whether hepatitis C virus (HCV) replicates in bone marrow, we investigated positive- and negative-strand HCV RNA in bone marrow cells and fluids, and sera from patients with HCV infection. The study population consisted of 15 patients positive for antibodies to HCV (anti-HCV). Positive- and negative-strands HCV RNA were detected using highly strand-specific rTth reverse transcripti...

AIM To assess the efficiency of phosphorothioate antisense oligodeoxynucleotide 1 (S-ODN1) on HCV translation inhibition in PBMC compared to hepatoma cells in vitro for the first time. MATERIALS AND METHODS The study included 34 treatment naive HCV patients. IRES domain III and IV sequence variations were tested in 45 clones from 9 HCV patients. PBMC of HCV positive patients were subjected to...

9 We assess the concordance between low level HCV values obtained using the VERSANT HCV RNA 10 1.0 Assay (kPCR) and COBAS AmpliPrep/COBAS TaqMan HCV Quantitative Test v2.0. 11 The correlation between the values obtained by the two RT-PCR assays for samples with quantifiable 12 HCV RNA levels revealed that viral load measured by kPCR significantly correlated with that of the 13 CAP/CTM (R=0.644,...

Endogenous retroviruses, non-retroviral RNA viruses and DNA viruses have been found in the mammalian genomes. The origin of Hepatitis C virus (HCV), the major cause of chronic hepatitis, liver cirrhosis, and hepatocellular carcinoma in humans, remains unclear since its discovery. Here we show that fragments homologous to HCV structural and non-structural (NS) proteins present in the European ra...

hepatitis c virus (hcv) has infected 3% of the population worldwide and 20% of the population in egypt. hcv infection can lead to hepatocellular carcinoma and death. the presently available treatment with interferon plus ribavirin, has limited benefits due to adverse side effects. seaweeds have become a major source of new compounds to treat viral diseases. this work aimed to study the effect o...

BACKGROUND Hepatitis C virus (HCV) is a major public health problem with 170 million chronically infected people throughout the world. Currently, the only treatment available consists of a combination of pegylated interferon (INF-alpha) and ribavirin, but only half of the patients treated show a sufficient antiviral response. Thus there is a great need for the development of new treatments for ...

The objective was to develop a method of HCV genome sequencing that allowed simultaneous genotyping and NS5A inhibitor resistance profiling. In order to validate the use of a unique RT-PCR for genotypes 1-5, 142 plasma samples from patients infected with HCV were analysed. The NS4B-NS5A partial region was successfully amplified and sequenced in all samples. In parallel, partial NS3 sequences we...

We assess the concordance between low level HCV values obtained using the VERSANT HCV RNA 1.0 Assay (kPCR) and COBAS AmpliPrep/COBAS TaqMan HCV Quantitative Test v2.0. The correlation between the values obtained by the two RT-PCR assays for samples with quantifiable HCV RNA levels revealed that viral load measured by kPCR significantly correlated with that of the CAP/CTM (R=0.644, P<0.0001). Th...