CAIRO: A health study has reported that the country has the highest rates of Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection in the world. The study, published on Monday by the National Academy of Sciences, says that an estimated 500,000 or more Egyptians are infected annually. This high rate of HCV transmission, the report said, may be due to the lack of sufficient safety precautions in medical and dental facilities, the authors suggest. “Nearly 7 out of every 1,000 Egyptians acquire HCV infections every year, suggesting intense ongoing transmission. This is the highest level of HCV transmission ever recorded at a national level for a blood borne infectious disease transmitted parenterally, that is, by use of non-sterile medical instruments,” said F. DeWolfe Miller, lead author of the study and a professor of epidemiology at the Department of Tropical Medicine and Medical Microbiology and Pharmacology at the University of Hawaii. “Although the high prevalence of hepatitis C in Egypt has been well established for many years, and linked in part to limited safety measures during anti-bilharzia campaigns, published estimates of prevalence from different Egyptian communities failed to provide a nationwide picture of the magnitude of ongoing HCV infection transmission,” the report said. In conducting the findings, the researchers looked at the estimates for the rate of new HCV cases in the country by using epidemiological data from a range of already completed studies. This included a 2008 Egyptian government study as the basis for the sample in the current report. “The study opened our eyes to a disease burden similar in scale and challenge to the HIV problem in sub-Saharan Africa: Millions of cases of an infection for which there is no vaccine, no effective treatment, and where case management is so expensive that it is beyond the reach of most patients,” said Laith J. Abu-Raddad, co-author of the study and assistant professor of public health at the Infectious Disease Epidemiology Group at the Weill Cornell Medical College–Qatar. According to the authors, the study calls “not only further analysis of HCV transmission in Egypt, but also justifies the immediate increase of resources to strengthen public health measures aimed at reducing the transmission of HCV in clinical and non-clinical settings, according to the authors.” Failure to address this problem will result in a massive disease burden in the nation in terms of HCV infection complications, including active liver disease, liver failure, or liver cancer, the report postulated. “There is only one way to deal with the HCV challenge in this country: HCV prevention,” warned Dr. Miller. “Effective and stronger HCV prevention programs are urgently needed in Egypt. Failure to act could swamp the public health system over the coming decades with millions of cases of HCV disease complications with an economic and social cost that this nation does not have the means to confront.” BM
