DAYTON, Ohio -- Within two years, Dr. Peter Somani predicts hepatitis C will kill more Americans than AIDS.

The former state health director sounded that alarm last week in helping to unveil the Ohio Hepatitis C Coalition, more than 200 organizations hoping to increase awareness of the viral liver disease that is spread through infected blood. The U.S. Surgeon General released a public service TV announcement this week for the same purpose.

Increased awareness is important because hepatitis C can go undetected for as long as 30 years after infecting people. They don't know to undergo medical treatment and take precautions against spreading the virus and straining their livers. In announcing his resignation Friday, Montgomery County courts clerk Craig Zimmers said doctors told him he had been infected about 20 years before his diagnosis a year and a half ago.

The disease has been recognized as a serious health threat only recently, as it surfaces among those who underwent blood transfusions before July 1992 or injected drugs with contaminated needles -- the two most common sources of infection.

"Most people have no idea they have hepatitis C until it has reached the chronic phase and the damage to their liver is severe," Somani said.

Seven of every 10 Americans with the hepatitis C virus don't realize it, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). That indicates how rough are the CDC estimates of 3.9 million infected Americans, of whom 2.7 have chronic liver disease. Both figures far exceed the 1 million estimated by the CDC to be living with HIV or AIDS.

About three people in 20 fight off the hepatitis C virus without consequences but about 1 in 20 eventually die from it, prompting Health News editors to write in April that a hepatitis C diagnosis is "like entering a lottery you didn't want to play."

Zimmers, 50, for whom treatment did not work, said he was a regular blood donor until the early '90s, when he was told his liver enzymes were slightly above elevated. "Naturally, I feel quite bad about that," he said.   The risk of infection from blood transfusion is down to 1 in 100,000 since donated blood has been routinely tested for the virus since 1992, so about 60 percent of infections now are believed to come from intravenous drug use. It also has been transmitted through dialysis before 1992, clotting blood products before 1987, birth by a mother with the virus, infected tattooing or body piercing needles, exposure to tainted blood in health care settings and unprotected sex.

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