Outcome of an exercise to notify patients treated by a general surgeon infected with the hepatitis C virus

Background: Health-care workers infected with the hepatitis C virus (HCV) and performing exposure-prone procedures may expose their patients to the risk of nosocomial HCV infection. Objective: To assess the number of provider-to-patient transmissions of HCV among former patients of an HCV-infected general surgeon. Results: The notification exercise covered 1461 individuals, on whom the surgeon performed 1683 operations. Eighty-two percent of these patients were tested for markers of HCV infection, and all but six subjects turned out to be not infected with the virus. Two of the anti-HCV positive patients were already infected before their operations, one individual was not available for further molecular analyses, and three subjects harboured HCV isolates that belonged to a different subtype (i.e. 1b) than the variant detected in the surgeon's serum. Conclusion: In this retrospective survey, no provider-to-patient transmission of HCV was detected among 1192 former patients of an infected general surgeon. This finding, one more time, suggests that such nosocomial transmission events are probably very rare. Consequently, recommendations for the management and guidance of HCV-infected health-care workers should carefully balance the workers' rights against justified patients' interests.