The appearance of the p19 and p24 core proteins might be related to acute HCVcc infection and chronic infection respectively and may play an important role in the pathology of a HCV infection.
The residual post-transfusion risk of HIV and HCV infection of blood collected from replacement blood donors ranged between 1:260 and 1:16 393 after screening for anti-HIV, p24 antigen and anti-HCV.
The combined yield for HIV and HCV RNA confirmed-positive, seronegative donations for the 1st year of testing has been 62 HCV NAT-reactive donations among more than 16.3 million screened (1:263,000) and four HIV NAT-reactive, p24 antigen-negative donations among greater than 12.6 million screened (1:13,150,000).
Among 58 clinically well-defined chronic non-A, non-B hepatitis (NANBH) patients, 49 (84.5%) were positive for p22 antibody (anti-p22), whereas 42 (72.4%) were positive for C100-3 antibody (anti-C100-3), as measured by the present assay using the HCV nonstructural protein as antigen.