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News and Views
Nature Medicine 7, 890 - 891 (2001)
doi:10.1038/90917
A mouse model for hepatitis C virus infection?
Nelson Fausto1
- Department of Pathology School of Medicine University of Washington Seattle, Washington, USA
e-mail: nfausto@u.washington.edu
Abstract
Patients with hepatitis C constitute the highest proportion of candidates for liver transplantation. The lack of small animal models for the disease has been a major stumbling block in understanding how hepatitis C and liver damage develop and in testing possible treatments. The report of infection of a mouse model with the hepatitis C virus is a significant and welcome achievement. (pages 927–933)
Until a few years ago, the alphabet soup of viral hepatitis only had two letters to denote the two distinctly identifiable types of the disease—hepatitis A and B. Hepatitis A, caused by a small RNA virus (HBA), is an acute disease of very short duration, acquired through ingestion of food or water contaminated with fecal material.
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