LONDON -- Medical experts believe cases of hepatitis C have reached epidemic proportions and predict the lingering liver disease will kill more people than AIDS over the next two decades.
"Hepatitis C has emerged from obscurity as a disease familiar to only a few experts to being recognized as a major public health problem worldwide," Dr. Adrian Di Bisceglie said in a report in The Lancet medical journal.
The professor of internal medicine at the University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri,8 and other experts believe deaths from hepatitis C will triple in the next 20 years.
Between one to two percent of the population in most developed countries is infected with the virus but the numbers are much higher in some parts of eastern Europe and Africa.