Egypt Is the First Country to Keep WHO's Gold Tier for Hepatitis C — and It Got There With Drugs Made at Home

Egypt Is the First Country to Keep WHO's Gold Tier for Hepatitis C — and It Got There With Drugs Made at Home

Egypt is first to defend the gold tier

On 14 October 2026 the World Health Organization confirmed that Egypt has kept its gold tier status on the path to eliminating hepatitis C. No other country has ever done that. Egypt was the first to reach gold, back in 2023; it is now the first to hold it. Business Insider Africa put the comparison bluntly in its headline: the African country is ahead of the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Russia, France and Germany.

WHO confirmed it in Cairo, after a July review

The validation was announced during the 73rd session of WHO's Regional Committee for the Eastern Mediterranean, held in Cairo. WHO assessed Egypt's progress across 2023 to 2025, and the finding had already been endorsed in July 2026 by the agency's Regional Validation Committee for HIV, Hepatitis and Sexually Transmitted Infections. Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus congratulated Egypt on 13 October and said he would hand the validation certificate to Health and Population Minister Khaled Abdel Ghaffar. WHO's own framing is that Egypt has moved from mass screening drives to embedding viral hepatitis care in primary health care and the universal health insurance system, under a 2025–2030 national sustainability plan.

Gold means 90% diagnosed and 80% treated

Gold is the top rung of WHO's path-to-elimination framework. Taipei Times, quoting Taiwan's health promotion authorities, puts the gold benchmark at a 90 percent diagnosis rate and an 80 percent treatment rate by 2030. Keeping the tier is harder than earning it: it demands durable infrastructure and consistent results over time, not a single campaign.

Ten years, and prevalence fell from 10% to under 0.38%

The headline number is the turnaround itself. Between 2013 and 2023 Egypt cut hepatitis C prevalence from roughly 10 percent of the population to less than 0.38 percent, according to Business Insider Africa and Egypt Independent — a shift achieved in a little over a decade.

60 million screened, 4.5 million cured

The vehicle was the "100 Million Healthy Lives" campaign launched in 2018. It tested more than 60 million people and delivered curative treatment to more than 4.5 million patients. Health agency data from the 2023 milestone shows Egypt diagnosed 87 percent of people living with the virus and treated 93 percent of those diagnosed. During the 2023–2025 review period the country also screened more than 5.5 million blood units and supplied 536 million safe, self-disabling injection devices.

The antivirals were manufactured at home

What made the scale affordable was domestic manufacturing. Egypt treated its patients with locally produced direct-acting antivirals. New African Magazine reports that replacing imports of 208 medicines with local production saves Egypt more than $732 million a year, that about 91 percent of domestic pharmaceutical demand is met locally, and that Egyptian medicines reach 147 export markets. Cairo is also working to localise 400 active pharmaceutical ingredients across 30 therapeutic areas, covering about $1.6 billion in imports. Ghana's President Mahama cited the model at the Alamein Africa Forum, naming the domestic manufacturer Pharco. The downstream effects are showing up in cancer statistics: liver cancer deaths in Egypt have fallen 22.1 percent and incidence 16.7 percent.

Neighbours are copying the playbook

Egypt is a founding member of the five-country core group behind a UN General Assembly resolution on viral hepatitis elimination, and its officials argue that advocacy now has to become action — Assistant Minister Mohamed Hassany's words were "from momentum to political action." The stakes are global: WHO estimates about 58 million people live with hepatitis C, hepatitis B and C together killed 1.34 million people in 2024, and more than 1.8 million new infections occur every year. Tedros said progress is "too slow and uneven," pointing to stigma, weak health systems and unequal access to care. The Coalition for Global Hepatitis Elimination estimates that hitting elimination targets would avert about 10 million deaths from liver failure and liver cancer. Tedros said in 2023 that Egypt had shown "what can be achieved with modern tools, and political commitment at the highest level."

The hard part now is holding the line

Under the 2025–2030 plan, Egypt will fold routine case finding, diagnosis, treatment and prevention into primary care facilities and the universal health insurance network, while tightening laboratory quality control and blood and injection safety. WHO's caution is packed into the word "maintain": the renewed certificate covers 2023–2025 only, and governance and laboratory standards have to keep improving through 2030. The real risk is resurgence once mass screening ends.