Risk of hepatitis C virus transmission from an infected gynecologist to patients: results of a 7-year retrospective investigation.

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Abstract
THE OCCUPATIONAL risk to health care workers of acquiring hepatitis C virus (HCV) is well recognized.1-5 During recent years, public health authorities as well as patients are increasingly concerned about HCV transmissions in the opposite direction, ie, from HCV-positive medical personnel to susceptible patients.6,7 Fears about such iatrogenically acquired HCV infections gained some credence with reports that HCV-positive surgeons8-10 or anesthesiology staff members11-13 transmitted the virus to their patients during the course of medical care. In most cases, patients were infected accidentally through inadvertent exposure to the health care workers' blood,8-10,13 and only 2 incidents were caused by clear breaches of infection control practices.11,12 At present, however, it is not known how often provider-to-patient transmissions of HCV really occur and what is the public health impact of these incidents. The best way to obtain accurate estimates for the risk would be to perform a series of retrospective studies of individuals treated by HCV-infected medical personnel as has been done for human immunodeficiency virus.14-20 To our knowledge, such retrospective investigations of large numbers of patients treated by HCV-infected health care workers have not been published.

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