Abstract: The hepatitis C virus is hitherto a tremendous threat to human beings, but many researchers have analyzed mathematical models for hepatitis C virus transmission dynamics only in the deterministic case. Stochasticity plays an immense role in pathology and epidemiology. Hence, the main theme of this article is to investigate a stochastic epidemic hepatitis C virus model with five states of epidemiological classification: susceptible, acutely infected, chronically infected, recovered or removed and chronically infected, and treated. The stochastic hepatitis C virus model in epidemiology is established based on the environmental influence on individuals, is manifested by stochastic perturbations, and is proportional to each state. We assert that the stochastic HCV model has a unique global positive solution and attains sufficient conditions for the extinction of the hepatotropic RNA virus. Furthermore, by constructing a suitable Lyapunov function, we obtain sufficient conditions for the existence of an ergodic stationary distribution of the solutions to the stochastic HCV model. Moreover, this article confirms that using numerical simulations, the six parameters of the stochastic HCV model can have a high impact over the disease transmission dynamics, specifically the disease transmission rate, the rate of chronically infected population, the rate of progression to chronic infection, the treatment failure rate of chronically infected population, the recovery rate from chronic infection and the treatment rate of the chronically infected population. Eventually, numerical simulations validate the effectiveness of our theoretical conclusions.

Key words: hepatitis C virus, acute and chronically infected, chronically infected treated, extinction, stationary distribution