Hepatitis Education Project

Mandy, our Correctional Health Program Manager, has been busy teaching classes at the Maleng Regional Justice Center in Kent and the King County Correctional Facility in Seattle. Across both jails, she taught 8 classes in just one week!
People who are incarcerated have the opportunity to attend her classes, where they learn about hepatitis. Many people are aware of hepatitis and are concerned about it, but there are a lot of myths for Mandy to debunk. Here are the facts when it comes to hepatitis C:

- You *cannot* catch hepatitis C from yourself. Hepatitis C is a transmissible virus.
- You *cannot* catch hepatitis C from casual contact like just living near someone else. Hepatitis C is only transmitted through direct contact with infected blood.
- Most of the time, it is more likely a person has contracted hepatitis C through IVDU prior to being in jail or prison, not inside.
In September, Mandy was awarded a certificate of appreciation from the King County Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention. In the coming months, she’ll be traveling around the State of Washington to teach at prisons. If you’d like to support her work and HEP’s work at the local, state, and national level - click the link in our bio to donate - we are a small non-profit and every donation matters.

A team of scientists from the CDC's Division of Viral Hepatitis analyzed Hepatitis C-related hospitalization rate data from 2012-2019 across the United States. The West South Central region, including Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas had the highest age-adjusted HCV-related hospitalization rates in this time period.
The Pacific region (including Alaska, California, Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington) had the third-highest HCV-related hospitalization rate from 2012-2019.
Nationally, among HCV-related hospitalizations, 28.7% had diabetes, 17.4% substance use disorder and 11.7% cancer.

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