This just in from Dennis (Smoke). Vets born between 1945 and 1965 are far more likely to have HCV. Gee, where did the VA police park the Squad car? I don’t see it out front. Having had ample opportunity to study this thing to death (no pun intended), VA surreptitiously tested us for decades and purposefully withheld the results. This violated the strictures of many local public health entities that demand immediate notification of any sexually transmitted diseases or major infections such as HIV/AIDS/ HCV.

It should  come as no surprise now that the information is coming to light. The CDC, NIH, IOM and other major entities are revealing more and more studies that depended in large part on none other than-ta-daaaaaaa!-VA studies of it’s Vets it wasn’t telling. This isn’t front page, July 2013 news though. VA has known, in many cases, that tens of thousands of you were infected and made no effort to contact you and tell you to seek medical intervention.

I can’t even begin to count how many of you have contacted me to say that you found out you had the bug for years and found it during testing in a civilian setting. In the course of developing your claims, many of you went to the Release of Information (ROI) at VAMCs and asked for your VA medical records. There, large as life and twice as natural, in plain print, were results of blood tests performed in the past that you were unaware of diagnosing you with HCV.

In any setting other than a governmental one, this would be actionable for litigation. Veterans, unfortunately, are a no deposit, no return item. The article zeros in and focuses on one salient fact- many of us in Vietnam are the most likely, by a factor of 66%, to be infected.

Among those disproportionately affected by chronic hep C is the veteran community, a population twice as likely to be infected with chronic hep C as the general population. Veterans may be at increased risk because they may have additional risk factors, such as having had blood exposure during combat, or immunization by air gun injection. Of the six million veterans receiving care from the Veterans Affairs’ (VA) health care system in 2010, 165,005 had evidence of chronic hep C. Most veterans with the disease being treated in the VA health care system in recent years were likely infected during the Vietnam War era any time from 1964 to 1975.

I implore any of you who have not been tested in this group to do so immediately. If you are receiving your medical from the VA, I would follow up within a week with a visit to the ROI and confirm the findings for yourself. I personally no longer trust them to tell me anything.