Egypt Wiped Out Hepatitis C. Now It Is Trying to Help the Rest of Africa.

Good for Egypt!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

He scraped together enough cash — $900, half his annual salary — to buy a course of the drugs that, a decade ago, began to revolutionize hepatitis C treatment in the United States and other high-income countries.

The donation came from a most unlikely source: Egypt, which only a few years ago had the world’s highest burden of hepatitis C. An estimated one in 10 people, about nine million Egyptians, were chronically infected.

In a public health campaign extraordinary for both its scale and its success, Egypt screened its entire population, brokered a deal for hugely discounted drugs and cured almost everyone with the virus.

Dr. Yvonne Ayerki Nartey, a physician at Cape Coast Teaching Hospital, joined the Coalition for Global Hepatitis Elimination to put together a plan for Ghana’s new response.

She needed first to figure out how many Ghanaians were infected and where they were; a national screening effort found that one in 20 people in the north of the country, an area where poverty rates are higher and health services weaker, had hepatitis C. She went on radio shows and spread word through Facebook and WhatsApp that treatment might soon be accessible.

At the same time, Ghana is improving blood safety and injection practices, drawing on lessons from Egypt, and educating traditional healers, reducing the rate of new infections, Dr. Ward said.

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