Most Children Born to Hepatitis C-Positive Mothers Don’t Get Tested

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Vertical transmission, or the spread of infection from mother to baby during childbirth, is the most common way that children get hepatitis C. However, it turns out that these children are rarely tested for the disease.

About 5% of children born to mothers with hepatitis C end up developing the chronic condition themselves. Researchers from the Philadelphia Department of Public Health investigated the testing rate of children born to infected mothers and documented the analysis in Clinical Infectious Diseases.

The team looked at 8,119 women with hepatitis C, ages 12 to 54. From this cohort, 500 women gave birth to at least one child from 2011 to 2013. A total of 55,623 children were born in Philadelphia during this time span, and 537 of them (1%) were born to mothers with hepatitis C.

 

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