Possibly? Yes, anything is possible.
When you say a five second incident, what is the exposure in concern? Five seconds of scratching your ear? Or a needle stick? If it’s a needle stick, it takes less than five seconds to inject yourself with a dirty needle, in which case the infection would likely occur.
What about five seconds of an HCV-positive male penetrating you rectally and ejaculating? If that happened, then it wouldn’t matter whether the exposure was five seconds or 3 hours long; that would likely cause an infection to occur.
On the other hand, what if the exposure is five seconds of a hand job? Well, in that case, the probability of infection would be slim-to-none.
These are all things to think about when you consider testing for hepatitis C virus, which is usually done by means of an antibody test or a PCR (polymerase chain reaction).
