Egypt and Sudan met to cooperate and coordinate for the treatment of 250,000 Sudanese citizens for Hepatitis C, under Egypt's presidential initiative to eliminate the disease among 1 million Africans.
Egyptian Minister of Health Hala Zayed held a virtual meeting on Saturday with her Sudanese counterpart Sara Abdel Azim Hassanein to discuss cooperation as part of efforts to promote cooperation in the health sector, in accordance with directives from Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi.
The meeting is the first to be held virtually between the ministers, who both had decided to hold further meetings to discuss future cooperation, the Egyptian Health Ministry’s spokesperson Khaled Megahed stated.
During the meeting, Zayed stressed Egypt’s readiness to send 200,000 drug doses to treat Hepatitis C patients in Sudan, along with PCR testing for the disease, as well as training for health staff on diagnosis protocols.
Moreover, Zayed invited her Sudanese counterpart to meet in Cairo in the coming days to put in place an executive plan to implement a joint project aimed at combating the malaria-bearing Gambia mosquito.
She also asked her Sudanese counterpart to provide medical information on those wounded during the country's revolution so that the hospitals can begin to receive them for free medical treatment.
Egypt announced in July that it had succeeded in becoming the first country to be free of Hepatitis C, which was a goal guided by a clear political vision from the Egyptian president.
In 2018, Egypt's health ministry established 13 centers to treat African nationals with hepatitis C. The initiative includes Burundi, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mali, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Tanzania, and Uganda.
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100 Million Health initiative[/caption]
About 60 million Egyptians were tested for Hepatitis C, in only seven months as part of the ‘100 Million Health initiative,’ which was carried out from October 2018 until April 2019, to screen and treat hepatitis and non-communicable diseases.
The initiative included mass screenings for citizens over the age of 18, for the early detection of Hepatitis C infection, alongside evaluation and treatment at health units deployed nationwide.
Hepatitis C, a major cause of liver cancer, is a liver disease caused by the hepatitis C virus (HCV), according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
The virus can cause both acute and chronic hepatitis, ranging in severity from a mild illness lasting a few weeks to a serious, lifelong illness.
There is currently no effective vaccine against hepatitis C, which killed approximately 399 000 people in 2016, however, research in this area is ongoing.
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