This year’s Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology has been awarded to a team of scientists who discovered the hepatitis C virus. Harvey J Alter, Michael Houghton and Charles M Rice have made a “decisive contribution to the fight against blood-borne hepatitis,” according to the prize committee.
The virus is a major global health problem that causes cirrhosis and liver cancer. An estimated 71 million people have chronic hepatitis C virus infection, with almost 400,000 people dying from the disease in 2016, according to the World Health Organization.