Hepatitis D historical perspective

Historical Perspective
Hepatitis D virus was first reported in the mid-1977, by an italian researcher, Mario Rizzetto, as a nuclear antigen in patients infected with HBV who had severe liver disease This nuclear antigen was then thought to be a hepatitis B antigen and was called the delta antigen. Subsequent experiments in chimpanzees showed that the hepatitis delta antigen (HDAg) was a structural part of a pathogen that required HBV infection to replicate The entire virus was cloned and sequenced in 1986, and obtained its own genus deltavirus