Hepatitis C virus: an overview.

In May 1988, Kuo and Houghton and their colleagues in Chiron Research Laboratory, in cooperation with the physicians from NIH and CDC, announced their discovery of the agent which is responsible for the majority of Non-A Non-B Hepatitis (NANB) in post-transfusion hepatitis (PTH)1,2, concluding a 15-year effort to search for this elusive agent. Although it is believed that there is another blood-borne agent responsible for a smaller percentage of the post-transfusion hepatitides, the new agent (an RNA virus closely related to Flavivirus) was named Hepatitis C (HCV).