That tattoo may get you in trouble with more than just your parents.
A recent study by researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas shows that people who have tattoos are about nine times more likely to contract the hepatitis C virus than people who do not have tattoos.
In the study, researchers showed that, of participants who had tattoos, 22 percent were HCV-positive. Only 3.5 percent of those without tattoos had the virus, however.
During the research, scientists considered other risk factors for the disease, such as unsafe sexual activity and intravenous drug use. Tattoos were by far the biggest contributor.
According to www.menstuff.org, Robert Haley, chief of epidemiology at UT Southwestern, said, “We found that commercially acquired tattoos accounted for more than twice as many hepatitis C infections as injection-drug use. This means that it may have been the largest single contributor to the nationwide epidemic of this form of hepatitis.”
HCV was first identified in 1989 and affects about 4 million Americans.
According to the study, health officials think that there was a rapid spread of the disease in the ’80s, which caused the number of infected people to swell quickly. The rate of transmission has slowed down significantly in recent years, though.
Nurse Cheryl Black of the Memorial Health Center said that the number of cases of hepatitis is so great that every nurse renewing her license must complete continuing education courses about the disease.
Surprisingly, in most cases where HCV was attributed to tattoos, they were acquired from commercial parlors, not amateur tattoo artists.
Texas law requires tattoo artists to wash their hands, wear single-use gloves and use disposable instruments or routinely sterilize their instruments. Disposable needles have less risk of contamination than sterilized needles.
When getting a tattoo, one should watch the artist to see if he follows these guidelines. Watch to make sure the artist does not test the needle’s sharpness on himself, which contaminates it.
Sally Johnson, a senior advertising major, says that she looked into the places where she got her tattoo first.
“If they weren’t clean, I wouldn’t even consider it,” she said. “I had to have heard about the tattoo artist, check out his reputation. A lot of kids got to a cheap tattoo place, but you’ve got to make sure, some places are really sketchy.”
The ABCs of Hepatitis
Hepatitis A is a fecal-oral transmission virus. This means that an infected person’s stool has to reach another person’s mouth to transmit the disease.
This most often is an issue when restaurant workers do not wash their hands before they handle food. That is why there are signs in restaurant restrooms telling employees to wash their hands, Black said.
“You just have to hope that nothing’s on those hands that will make you sick,” she said. “People need to understand that hand-washing is pivotal to health maintenance.”
The disease can also be spread by participating in anal sex, because stool may get on one’s hands.
Often with hepatitis A, sufferers vomit a lot and have flu-like symptoms, their skin may turn yellow and their urine cola-colored, but the virus usually goes away on its own.
There is a vaccine for HAV, but it is only given when one is planning on traveling to developing countries, where the disease is more common and drinking water may be contaminated.
Hepatitis B and C are serum-semen transmission viruses. They are transmitted in the same ways that HIV is.
“The virus [hepatitis B] is 100 times more contagious than HIV,” said Dr. Nancy Merrill of SMU’s health center. “It can live outside the body for several hours. Often, people don’t even know they have it.”
Many states, Texas included, now require children to be vaccinated for HBV before entering elementary school.
Black said that college students are at much higher risk, however, and most have not been vaccinated.
HBV can be transmitted through tattooing, just like HCV, but can be prevented by getting a series of three shots.
HCV has no vaccine and does not go away. In many cases, it causes chronic liver problems years after infection.
