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Two-year-old programme treats 1m patients following outbreak sparked by dirty needles
When Egypt launched a mass medical programme in the 1970s the intention was to treat people suffering from schistosomiasis, or bilharzia, a parasitic disease that was widespread in the Arab state. But the scheme inadvertently created another health disaster.
The use of unsterilised needles to jab millions of villagers across the country led to an epidemic of the hepatitis C virus, a blood-borne disease that can damage the liver and lead to deadly complications such as cirrhosis and cancer. Such was the scale of the infections that Egypt has one of the world’s highest incidence rates of hepatitis C — about 7 per cent of its 90m population have the virus.
However, cutting-edge medicines, provided under a government treatment programme — the first of its kind in the world — hold the promise of curing millions of sufferers afflicted with the disease and easing the burden on a creaking public health system and the struggling economy.
Read more….https://www.ft.com/content/d1e18e96-d81b-11e6-944b-e7eb37a6aa8e