After winning five Grammy Awards and releasing 20 top 10 songs in the 1980s with The Judds, Naomi announced her retirement in 1990. The singer revealed that she had been diagnosed with hepatitis C, which she contracted from an infected needle during her time working as a nurse. .
“When they told me I had hepatitis C, I was on top of the world, selling out stadiums,” Naomi said at an event at Morristown Medical Center in New Jersey in 2016, according to The Daily Record newspaper in Morris County, New Jersey. . “Then they told me I had three stinking years to live.”
In 1991, she founded the Naomi Judd Research and Education Fund to raise awareness of hepatitis C, and also became a spokesperson for the American Liver Foundation.
