From Needle Stick to Cure for Hepatitis

As doctors-in-training in the early 1990s, my friends and I became obsessed with the question of what we would do if we were pricked with an infected needle at work. We all had witnessed the inexorable, often painful march toward death of patients with hepatitis C and AIDS. We imagined the despair we would feel in that situation: the dashed hopes, the lost years of schooling and training. Many of us saw ourselves walking out of the hospital and not looking back. We couldn’t imagine throwing ourselves back into the fray.


In 1977, while working in the hospital as a third-year medical student, Dr. Dieterich was accidentally stuck with a needle contaminated with hepatitis. And for the next 20 years, he struggled with regular and debilitating episodes of exhaustion, jaundice and high fevers. But he did not quit medicine. Instead Dr. Dieterich continued to train and then to practice, eventually becoming a national expert in hepatitis C, the very disease he had acquired.

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