The Antidote: Inside The World Of New Pharma - Plot & Excerpts
Unlike AIDS, the epidemic was stealthy, slow moving, and indolent, with symptoms taking decades to show up in most infected patients. The disease was known only since the 1960s, initially as a reaction to blood transfusions, and previously named—“in a less than brilliant foray into nomenclature,” its codiscoverer said—non-A, non-B hepatitis. Only now, more than two decades later, was it becoming a recognized public health threat. Hepatitis C puzzled virologists, baffled doctors, and had no vocal constituency among sufferers, the vast majority of whom didn’t know they had it. Three years earlier, scientists at the biotech company Chiron Corporation identified the virus that caused it, making a blood test available, and ever since then doctors were discovering more and more people who were infected but had no symptoms. At the same time, nearly 40 percent of carriers reported that they never used intravenous drugs, never received a transfusion, and had no evident reason for contracting the infection by blood-to-blood contact.
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