Giving Compass' Take:

• The Egyptian government is working to eliminate hepatitis C through the administration of low-cost drugs to patients identified through screenings. 

• Is this an effective model for other countries to follow? How can philanthropy help to facilitate programs like this one? 

• Some organizations are promoting health through community engagement activities. 

Just five years ago, with the best medical therapies available, the odds of curing a person infected with hepatitis C were no better than a coin toss. Eliminating the disease from a whole country was unthinkable.

But today, Egypt is wiping the disease from its population at an unprecedented pace. The effort was made possible by revolutionary new drugs—but no country, including the United States, has come close to deploying them at equivalent scale.

Egypt has shown that dramatic improvements in public health are possible when drugs are priced affordably—and a government makes an effort to systematically deploy them. But Egypt is also the exception that proves the rule that while modern society has proven capable of developing transformative medical innovations, it’s far less proficient at maximizing their use.

How fast Egypt eliminates the disease hinges on how swiftly it diagnoses the people infected, and authorities there are still determining the scale of their screening program and gathering the resources to pay for it. At the rate the country is currently screening and treating patients it would cut disease prevalence in half by 2023; if it substantially scales up the program, at an additional cost of $530 million, it could essentially eliminate the disease by then.

Read the full article about hepititus C treatment by Ted Alcorn at The Atlantic.