The harm caused by hepatitis C, a blood-borne virus that mostly attacks the liver, is often silent but substantial. Carriers experience few symptoms at first, but without treatment, most will carry the virus for life. It gradually wears down the body, causing irreparable liver damage and increasing the risk of cancer.

The last few years have seen nothing short of a medical breakthrough in treating the disease — with new drugs that can effectively cure most cases — and yet infections are soaring, with an estimated 30,000 new infections seen within the U.S. in 2014. A new report released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suggests that this resurgence can be blamed almost entirely on the opioid crisis that has ravaged the country.

Since 2006, the authors confirmed, rates of reported hepatitis C cases have grown everywhere. But most troubling is where the largest increases have been happening — in struggling areas of the country simultaneously dealing with epidemics of opioid abuse. And its victims have primarily been the young.

In Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia, states which have seen some of the highest rates of overdose deaths in recent years, acute hepatitis C cases in people under the age of thirty more than tripled from 2006 to 2012. Cases were also more than twice as common in rural, poorer parts of those states than they were in urban areas, and sufferers were predominantly white. At the same time, rates of people being admitted to substance abuse treatment facilities for opioid addiction within the four states similarly increased.

Marcus Hopkins, program director of the Community Access National Network’s HIV/HCV Co-Infection Watch, a DC-based non-profit that coordinates and promotes the expansion of health care services for people living with either disease, agrees with the CDC’s findings. He goes one step further in explicitly blaming opioids for the rise in both hepatitis C and its sibling, hepatitis B.

“Prescription opioids and heroin injected intravenously are the largest contributor to new hepatitis C infections in people aged 18-45,” he told Vocativ. “This holds true across all race and sex demographics, and in every part of the U.S.”

But despite now having a highly effective class of drugs that can cure nearly 90 percent of hepatitis C infections, called direct-acting antivirals, on hand, Hopkins said, the medical community has been slow to treat patients because of the drugs’ exorbitant cost.

In some cases, the wholesale price tag of a treatment course can run close to $100,000 per patient, limiting the ability for public health providers like Medicaid to purchase as many drugs as needed. Pressured by low stockpiles, these providers have refused to pay for many with the disease to receive these medications, Hopkins said, including drug users. A handful of restrictions slow things down further, like rules that keep drug users from receiving treatment, based on the assumption that they’re not likely to benefit from it. Doctors have argued these guidelines aren’t based on any medical evidence and that all sufferers living with the disease should be eligible. Other insurers require costly medical specialists to sign off on DAA treatment, further pricing people out.

Despite assurances from President Donald Trump during his campaign to address the opioid crisis, Hopkins doubts any good will come from his administration’s plans to overhaul the country’s drug control or health care policy. “The current administration is often at odds with itself over effectively combating both the opioid addiction crisis and viral hepatitis,” he said.

For instance, even as Trump officials like Health Secretary Tom Price and Attorney General Jeff Sessions have visited opioid-ravaged states and called for the aggressive need to come together and safeguard the country from addiction in recent days, their words and actions show little understanding of the problem, Hopkins said.

This past Tuesday, during a visit to Charleston, West Virginia, Secretary Price made clear he wasn’t supportive of medication-assisted treatments to wean people off their addiction. “If we’re just substituting one opioid for another, we’re not moving the dial much,” he said. Instead, he’d rather more attention and funding be given to “faith-based” programs. The comment came in the wake of reports that the administration is weighing cuts to the Office of National Drug Control Policy that would strip 95 percent of its budget, a move Hopkins sees as “fundamentally antithetical” to controlling the epidemic.

On Friday, Attorney General Sessions, a day after saying both he and President Trump were committing to reversing the trend of opioid addiction, reinstated a Bush-era policy commanding federal prosecutors to pursue the harshest possible sentences for criminal defendants — a move that will undoubtedly lengthen the time spent behind bars for drug offenses and increase the federal prison population, another at-risk group for Hepatitis C. Anywhere from 15 to 60 percent of the prison and jail population may carry the virus, Hopkins said, though most will never find out about their infection, since few facilities can afford to screen for it.

On top of it all, Trump’s planned replacement for the Affordable Care Act, the American Health Care Act, is poised to strip hundreds of millions in Medicaid funding to fuel tax breaks for the wealthy and pharmaceutical companies, which “would effectively make treating HCV in Medicaid clients a virtual impossibility,” Hopkins said.

“If we do not address the opioid crisis in a meaningful manner,” he added, “we will make little appreciable headway in combating the HCV epidemic.”