The rate of Hepatitis B in Egypt has dropped by 15 percent over the last decade, thanks to high vaccination rates. Now, less than 1 percent of Egyptian kids under the age of five have the disease.
This is good news, because “Egypt had one of the highest rates of viral hepatitis in the world” in the 20th century, notes the World Health Organization. Daily News Egypt reports:
Egypt has become the first country in the World Health Organization’s Eastern Mediterranean Region to meet the WHO target for hepatitis B control, a milestone achievement officially recognized during a ceremony held in Cairo on Sunday.
At the event, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Health Khaled Abdel Ghaffar received a formal certificate from WHO, confirming Egypt’s success in achieving the benchmark for reducing hepatitis B prevalence among children and maintaining sustained vaccine coverage.
According to national surveys conducted between 2008 and 2024, hepatitis B prevalence among individuals under 60 has declined by 15% since 2015, while rates among children under ten have dropped by 50%. Notably, prevalence among children under five now stands at below 1%—the threshold established by WHO for hepatitis B control… Egypt has maintained over 90% coverage of the hepatitis B third-dose vaccine for more than a decade….
The Ministry of Health launched the Egyptian Vaccine Manufacturers Alliance (EVMA) to localize vaccine production and strengthen domestic supply chain resilience.
Hepatitis B is the most common type of hepatitis worldwide. About 300 million people are infected globally, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia.
“Between the 1950s and 1980s, inadvertent infection transmission associated with unsafe injection practices occurred in the attempt to control schistosomiasis, a parasitic disease carried by water snails. Over 6 million Egyptians were infected with hepatitis C in this way.”
Egypt had the highest rate of Hepatitis C in the world. 15% of the Egyptian population were infected with Hepatitis C. But Egypt has greatly reduced its Hepatitis C rate, from 10% to 0.38% in a little over a decade.
In other good news, the African nation of Guinea recently eradicated sleeping sickness, a parasitic disease carried by the tsetse fly that causes irreversible brain damage and then death, if left untreated (sleeping sickness also leads to disrupted sleeping patterns, aggressiveness, psychosis, and bizarre behavior).
Niger recently became the first nation in Africa to eliminate river blindness, a disease spread by flies that breed near rivers. Those flies carry long thin parasitic worms that burrow in the sufferer’s skin.
