Hepatitis C (HCV) is transmitted by via blood-to-blood contact, particularly through poorly sterilized medical equipment – particularly injections, and transfusion with contaminated blood products. It is associated particularly with drug use.  Infection is generally silent, but after many years it may result in cirrhosis of the liver, liver cancer, and liver failure. Recently highly effective anti-virals have been developed.

Estimates of its prevalence are necessary to give an indication of the potential future incidence of severe liver diseases, and to assess the potential role of screening.

This project brought together data on HCV prevalence in current Injecting Drug Users (IDUS), previous IDUs and non-IDUs, with data on the size of these risk groups. The key publications were

Sweeting MJ, De Angelis D, Hickman M, Ades AE. Estimating hepatitis C prevalence in England and Wales by synthesizing evidence from multiple data sources. Assessing data conflict and model fit. Biostatistics 2008;  9 (4): 715-734. doi: 10.1093/biostatistics/kxn004
http://biostatistics.oxfordjournals.org/content/9/4/715.full.pdf+html

Sweeting MJ, De Angelis D, Ades AE Hickman M, Hope V, Ramsay M. An evidence synthesis approach to estimating Hepatitis C Prevalence in England and Wales. Stat Methods Med Res 2008; 18(4), 361-379   doi: 10.1177/0962280208094691
http://smm.sagepub.com/content/18/4/361.full.pdf+html