Many baby boomers don't even know they are carrying the virus, which can lay dormant for many years before emerging with symptoms that include jaundice, abdominal pain, and nausea. Hepatitis C is the leading cause of liver disease and causes up to 10,000 deaths annually.

Sharing of contaminated needles by drug users, blood transfusions, and unprotected sex can spread the virus; improved screening and needle-exchange programs have cut the infection rate by 90 percent since 1989.

But that's too late for many unwitting carriers -- many of them middle-aged, white, well-off professionals. As a result, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expects the hepatitis C infection rate to triple over the next decade. "The majority of my patients experimented with drugs during the '60s and '70s and now work on Wall Street," said Robert S.  Brown Jr., medical director for the Center for Liver Disease and Transplantation at New York Presbyterian Hospital. 

About four million Americans are suspected of having the hepatitis C virus. Drug treatment has improved, and about 20 percent of victims can eliminate the virus with treatment.

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