Egypt Wiped Out Hepatitis C. Now It Is Trying to Help the Rest of Africa. – The New York Times
Global Health
Effective drugs that have made the disease curable have yet to reach most of the region.
Sulemana Musah, a schoolteacher in Accra, Ghana, started feeling sick in 2011, while he was a student, but he didn’t receive a hepatitis C diagnosis until 2017.Credit…
Supported by
Stephanie Nolen, who covers global health, reported this story in Ghana.
For seven years, Sulemana Musah put almost every bit of money that came his way into his war with hepatitis C.
His student loans for graduate school, his salary from his job as a high school teacher and the cash he earned from a side gig selling yams all went to tests and medicines to try to cure the virus that debilitated him. Mr. Musah, 27, who lives in Accra, the capital of Ghana, set aside dreams of starting a business, building a house, getting married.
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.
He was the rare patient for whom that treatment wasn’t enough, so for years he tried, unsuccessfully, to save enough for another. “I was left just waiting for God to do his wonders,” he said.
Then in March, his doctor gave him extraordinary news: The Ghanaian government had received a donation of medications for hepatitis C. He could have treatment for free. Within weeks, Mr. Musah had the pills. In October, a blood test showed he was cured at last.
He was broke, exhausted — and ready to dust off his ambitions.
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.
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