Throughout the years, many diseases have had significant effects on the world such as Ebola, AIDS, and the plague. Hepatitis is one of them. Hepatitis is defined as any irritation of the liver, or anything that makes it inflamed. It also described a group of infectious diseases cause by viruses that attack the liver. There are six different types of the disease that have already been discovered. They are Hepatitis A, B, C, D, E, and G. All of these end up causing disease except for Hepatitis G, which just lives in the blood and does not cause the infectant to show signs of any illness (Berkman 2). Although, some of the most important cases of Hepatitis deal with Hepatitis A, B, and C.

The history of Hepatitis dates back to almost the beginning of medicine. (Berkman 3) The first recorded cases of the disease were thought to have been right after the distribution of the small pox vaccine in a shipyard in Germany in 1883. During the early and middle parts of the 1900s. The disease was watched closely with the use of contaminated needles and syringes. The effect that hepatitis has on the liver is similar to the effects that alcohol causes. Both end up scaring the liver in the end. When the virus hits the liver, it causes it to be inflamed. The body’s immune system trys to fight the virus with cells called lymphocytes, which end up hurting the liver even more. Fibrosis occurs because now the liver has been scarred. When the scarring gets bad enough, the blood flow gets slower and causes cirrhosis. Then, the blood begins to back up and leak into other organs. The important functions that the liver performs (Berkman 4), such as manufacturing proteins and regulating the transport of fat stores and controlling the production and excretion of cholesterol (Berkman 3), become more difficult to do. (more…)