Editor 2013 Hepatitis C has long been regarded as the ‘silent epidemic’. Although there is some truth in this statement that reflects the mostly asymptomatic course of infection and the low perception of the disease in the general public, the situation has changed profoundly in the last couple of years. On one hand this is due to the increasing awareness of chronic hepatitis C, especially as improved therapy options become available and are announced in press releases; on the other hand enormous progress has been made in our understanding of the molecular and cellular biology of the hepatitis C virus (HCV), which starts to put HCV into the position of a role model for many other, especially plus-strand RNA viruses.