Why Is Hepatitis Considered A Mysterious Disease?

For one reason, because up until now man has not been able to isolate the virus that causes it. Thus science writer Lawrence Galton stated: "Of all the diseases that afflict man, few are more debilitating to the sufferer, more frustrating to the scientist and ultimately more mysterious and elusive than hepatitis."
Another reason why hepatitis deserves to be termed mysterious is that its symptoms are by no means clear-cut; and this, incidentally, may be another reason why there evidently are so many more cases of hepatitis than are reported. A person may have had hepatitis but thought he was merely having a bad cold, a touch of the flu, a bad case of indigestion or diarrhoea, not recognizing the nature of his health problem. Thus it has happened that physicians have had patients operated on for gallstones or had exploratory operations performed because of suspected cancer, only later to discover that the patient had been suffering all along from hepatitis.