Pakistan now has the highest rate of Hepatitis C infections, with over 500,000 people getting the disease since 2015, Geo has reported.
According to Dr. Homie Razavi, an epidemiologist at the Centre for Disease Analysis (CDA) in the United States, Pakistan has the highest global prevalence of Hepatitis C infections, with an estimated 10 million persons affected.
“Pakistan is now home to the world’s largest population of patients living with Hepatitis C, surpassing even China, India and Nigeria. We have been working for the last two years with various provincial health departments in Pakistan and following detailed research and analysis, we found that around half a million new Hepatitis C infections emerged in Pakistan from 2015 to 2021. The total number of Hepatitis C patients is estimated to be 10 million in Pakistan, the highest in the world,” Dr Razavi told a news briefing in Karachi.
Suggesting that Pakistan should learn from Egypt which has successfully brought down it’s rate of the potentially fatal virus. In 2015, Egypt had the fourth-highest number of Hepatitis C infections; today, it has the seventeenth-highest number. According to Dr. Razavi, Egypt established a national programme to screen its whole population and treated everyone who tested positive.
