A few days of increasing nausea were enough to transform an ordinary dinner into a hospital stay. This is what happened to Angelo Mazzone, 46 years old, originally from Ruvo di Puglia and founder of the social page “Secret Milan“, followed by around 90 thousand people since 2014. He told Corriere della Sera that he looked in the mirror without recognizing himself, due to his yellow eyes and a skin tone that he himself compares to that of a Simpsons character.
The blood tests confirmed the suspicion, it was hepatitis A, with a bilirubin so high that it was necessary to go to the emergency room and then to be admitted to the Milan Polyclinic. Mazzone identified the possible origin of the infection in a dinner consumed two weeks earlier in an Eritrean restaurant in the Lombardy capital, where he had tasted rolls with raw vegetables for the first time. “Maybe those vegetables were stored badly,” he hypothesizes, while admitting that he has no definitive proof and that he feels angry about this. When he reported it to the doctors, the hospital told him that a report would be sent to the Nas police.
Five days of isolation
Hospitalization lasted five days, the time needed for the bilirubin values to stabilize. For hepatitis A, explains Mazzone, there is no specific cure, just rest and hydration, waiting for the liver to recover on its own. The hardest part, according to him, was not the physical one but the psychological one. “The isolation was alienating, treated as if I were a plague victim,” he says, recalling that the only human contact was with the nurses, who were forced to show up “decorated” to bring him meals and replace his IV drip. Today Mazzone is back in the gym, although he admits that he still feels a little tired, and will have to undergo checks every fortnight to monitor both his liver and blood values. In the meantime, he says, he abstains from sexual life until his values have returned completely to normal, for fear of transmitting the infection to others. He hopes to recover within a couple of months. Convinced in the past that he was covered by the vaccine, he discovered only after his diagnosis that hepatitis A was not included in the mandatory vaccination plan. Hence the appeal he wanted to launch: “Get vaccinated, this infection can be dangerous.”
Hepatitis A: causes and importance of the vaccine
According to what was explained by the San Raffaele Hospital in Milan, hepatitis A is an acute infectious disease caused by the HAV virus, which affects the liver and is more frequent among children and young adults. Professor Massimo Colombo, director of the Liver Center of the IRCCS San Raffaele, clarifies that the infection occurs through the feco-oral route, often linked to contaminated food or water, poor hygiene in food preparation, travel to endemic areas and unprotected sexual intercourse. The symptoms appear after an incubation of 15-50 days and include nausea, tiredness, fever and, in adults, the appearance of jaundice caused by the accumulation of bilirubin (precisely the signs described by Mazzone).
There is no specific therapy, we proceed with clinical monitoring and hydration, until spontaneous recovery. Prevention is based on the vaccine, recommended in particular for anyone traveling to risk areas, or living with infected people, as well as on compliance with basic hygiene rules when preparing food.
