Hepatitis C is a lifelong infection for most people. Some people are lucky and can fight off hepatitis C on their own. This is most likely to happen in the first 6-12 months of infection. Other people were successfully treated such that the hepatitis C infection is gone. During infection, the body's immune system knows that something isn't right and tries to fight off the infection. One of the ways that the immune system fights hepatitis C is to make proteins called antibodies. We can detect these antibodies in blood as anti-HCV antibodies. This test is pretty cheap and we use it as our fist test to see if someone has been exposed to hepatitis C. Even when the infection has gone, anti-HCV antibodies tend to stay around for life as the body's immune system remembers the hepatitis C infection. Unfortunately, these antibodies are not good enough to make people immune to hepatitis C. People who have gotten rid of hepatitis C infection can be re-infected if they are exposed to hepatitis C again. This can get confusing, but we can sort it out by looking for the hepatitis C virus directly using a testing method called polymerase chain reaction (PCR), also known as the viral load.