Hepatitis A Virus

Abstract

Type A viral hepatitis, or “infectious” hepatitis, is almost certainly an ancient disease, with descriptions of contagious jaundice described as long ago as the fifth century B.C. (reviewed in ref. 188). Although infectious causes of hepatitis other than hepatitis A virus (HAV) may have been responsible for some of these outbreaks, the description of many outbreaks of epidemic jaundice appear to have resulted from HAV infection. Recognition of infectious hepatitis as a distinct clinical entity did not begin to evolve until the first part of the twentieth century (106,188). Infectious hepatitis was a major problem for military forces during World War II, prompting studies that demonstrated the existence of at least two distinct transmissible hepatitis agents, one responsible for short-incubation, “infectious” jaundice (subsequently renamed type A hepatitis) and the other causing long-incubation, “homologous serum” jaundice (type B hepatitis) (62,98,99,113,114). These two agents were distinguished by differences in incubation periods, apparent modes of transmission, and lack of cross-protection in human challenge studies (113). Several decades later, with the advent of specific tests for hepatitis A and B viruses, it became apparent that most cases of post-transfusion hepatitis could be attributed to neither of these viruses (2). This led to the realization that there were other distinct types of viral hepatitis, termed “non-A, non-B” hepatitis. The most common etiologic agent of this entity was identified in 1989, and it has since been named hepatitis C (16).KeywordsViral HepatitisAcute HepatitisFulminant HepatitisAfrican Green Monkey Kidney CellEmpty CapsidThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.