By Daryl Lang

It's a concern of every traveling photojournalist: What happens if I get sick?

Ask Stanley Greene. Greene, the award-winning photographer with the NOOR agency, recently revealed that has been battling Hepatitis C.

After several months on the sidelines, Greene has the disease under control with medication. Recently he traveled to Afghanistan and shot a powerful photo story about the crisis of drug abuse and infectious disease.

Greene revealed that he had Hepatitis C while speaking before an audience at the Visa pour l'Image festival in Perpignan, France, on Sept. 5. Greene thinks he may have contracted the disease from a contaminated razor when he was working in Chad last year and got a shave.

In an interview with PDN, Greene stressed that illness is no reason for an editor not to consider a photographer for an assignment.

"If we want to stop, let us decide that. If we think that we can do these stories, if we think that we can go there, then trust us," Greene said. "We won't let you down."

Greene kept a busy schedule at Visa pour l'Image and spoke animatedly about his work. But he said he was confined to bed for a month recently. "There were times I couldn't climb up the stairs at the subway. My legs just felt like cement. I couldn't stop crying. Yeah, it was really bad," he says.

Greene credits his friends, including fellow photographers at the NOOR agency and Visa pour l'Image director Jean-Francois Leroy, with motivating him to seek treatment and get back to work. Leroy visited Greene in New York to convince him to shoot a project to be exhibited at the festival. Leroy also helped Greene find backers to fund the Afghanistan project, including the Russian Reporter Magazine.

Traveling with a translator and filmmaker Nina Alvarez, Greene went into drug dens and hospitals, photographing addicts and doctors. He completed the story in a month. He says the pressure to finish the project before the festival and the state he was in – a "fog" – actually helped his photography.

Greene sounded impatient with editors who passed on the project initially but were praising it when they saw it on display at Perpignan. "Many people had an opportunity to support this project. They decided not to," he said.

At the panel discussion at Perpignan, Greene spoke about a moment in Afghanistan when he watched a doctor diagnose a child with Hepatitis C – likely transmitted through a contaminated blood supply in Kabul. Greene told an audience he felt particularly angry at the moment, understanding that the doctor's diagnosis was like a "death sentence" for the child.

Hepatitis C is spread through blood and can lead to chronic liver disease, which can be fatal. There is no vaccine and Hepatitis C remains in an infected person's bloodstream, but many people infected with the disease display no symptoms at all.

Asked if he can keep working indefinitely, Greene immediately said yes.

"Of course I'm going to keep working. I mean, there's nothing else to do. What am I going to do, stop working?," he said. "It's what I do, it's my life. I'm not going to stop."