Prison's deadliest inmate, hepatitis C, escaping

updated 6:15 p.m. ET March 14, 2007

VACAVILLE, Calif. - The most dangerous thing coming out of prison these days may be something most convicts don’t even know they have: hepatitis C.

Nobody knows how many inmates have the disease; by some estimates, around 40 percent of the 2.2 million in jail and prison are infected, compared with just 2 percent of the general population.

Eventually, when they are released, medical experts predict they will be a crushing burden on the health care system, perhaps killing as many people as AIDS in years to come. At the same time, they will be carriers, spreading the disease.

Hepatitis C can be treated, but many prisons do not test for it. Among the reasons: Budgets are tight, and treatment is expensive. So prison officials close their eyes to the gathering emergency and pass it along to the outside world.

“Right now there’s a golden opportunity to bring solutions to this problem before it hits,” said Dr. John Ward, director of viral hepatitis at the National Center for HIV/AIDS at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

Hepatitis C is already the most common disease of its sort in the United States — a chronic, life-threatening, blood-borne infection. It is most commonly linked to infected needles used for drugs, though prison tattoos and body piercing with non-sterile equipment are also risky.

'Silent killer'
What makes this virus particularly insidious is that as many as half of the people who have hepatitis C don’t even know they have it. The “silent killer,” already considered epidemic by the World Health Organization, often remains dormant for decades.

Some of the infected are lucky: One in five people who get hepatitis C will clear it out of their system naturally. But without treatment, one in four will suffer liver failure or develop liver cancer. Last year liver cancer was the only one of the top 10 fatal cancers in this country to increase, in large part because of hepatitis C.

More than $1 billion is already spent each year on this country on hepatitis C, and those costs are expected to soar unless prevention and treatment are expanded.

Without those changes, researchers project that liver-related deaths will triple from around 13,000 in 2000 to 39,000 by 2030. It’s also estimated that 375,000 Americans with hepatitis C will develop cirrhosis by the year 2015.

Anita Taylor, 48, is already there, in end-stage liver disease. Taylor speaks very slowly and moves with care. She often finds that she can’t say the words she wants to — they just won’t come out. Her body hurts most of the time. Her nose bleeds a lot.

'Doctor gave me a death sentence'
A mother of two and former heroin addict, Taylor said she learned she had hepatitis C when she was jailed in Nevada in 1991 for being under the influence of drugs.

“They tested me and told me I had hepatitis C. They didn’t tell me there was a treatment and a cure,” she said. “And I didn’t know to ask.”

Taylor’s experience is not unusual.

“The doctor gave me a death sentence, recalls Leslie Czirr, a 36-year-old parolee. “He told me, ’There’s no cure for this and you will die from it unless you are hit by a truck first,”’

Czirr learned she had hepatitis C during a prenatal examination in 1996, at a time when she wasn’t in prison. Czirr has been arrested 10 times for drug possession and served almost eight years in prison on various drug possession and dealing charges.

She has started to suffer exhaustion, brain fog and aches. She recently enrolled in a county program to be treated — treatment, she said, she was denied at California’s Norco State Prison.

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