Playing sport

If you take part in sport, please read this section. Due to the fact that the virus is passed on through blood to blood contact, there are some issues to be aware of.

Contact and team sports can often lead to injuries that may result in bleeding. So it is important to know how to treat wounds and clean up blood properly.

If you inject steroids for body building, make sure you use a new set of injecting equipment each time, and never let anyone else borrow your injecting equipment. If needles and syringes are shared, there is a high risk of passing on the virus to others. The equipment involved with preparing drugs for injection can also harbour the virus. Infected blood can survive on spoons, and in water and filters, so these should not be shared either.

Hepatitis C can survive in tiny droplets of blood, so small you can't see them. In theory, the virus could be passed on through shared toiletries such as scissors or razors. Of course, infected blood would have to get into another's bloodstream for this to happen, so it remains most unlikely. However, items that could nick or graze the skin in the changing rooms should never be shared.