Dirty Needles Kill One Million Egyptians
From IPS…
From 1964 to 1982 the World Health Organization sponsored a massive program of tartar-emetic injections in Egypt to wipe out parasitic bilharzia, and Egyptian healthcare workers unfortunately re-used unsterilized hypodermic needles again and again and again and again.
At the time, nobody knew exactly what was being transmitted by all those dirty needles, but when Hepatitis C was eventually identified, Egypt was reeking with it.
5,500,000 Egyptians have developed chronic hepatitis, which eventually causes liver failure and death in about 25% of infected individuals.
As you might expect in a country where sterilization of medical instruments was more or less unknown only 25 years ago, “treatment options” are primitive for Egyptians suffering from Hepatitis C, and even if a giant pharmaceutical corporation in faraway America developed a miracle cure for Hepatitis C tomorrow, most Egyptians probably couldn’t afford it.
What's the point of this diary?
(No answer)
May 5, 2009 12:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
Oh I don't know. I took away that sometimes when we are attempting to do the right thing and on the surface a very good thing we fail took look at the whole picture. So in the end we do more damage than good.
May 5, 2009 12:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
Maybe nobody can look at the whole picture.
May 5, 2009 12:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
32,000,000 Egyptians can't read.
So what?
(No answer)
May 5, 2009 12:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
Average per capita income in Egypt is about $1700, but what's the median income?
This question is surprisingly hard to answer, but a similar question is very easy.
The median household income in New Egypt, an unincorporated township in Ocean County, New Jersey, is $49,297.
May 5, 2009 12:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
Already rec'd. This is interesting and sad.
I would like to know why the WHO did not dispose of the needles and see they were destroyed. That is part of their mandate.
Again, with the medical tools available to humanity it is beyond my comprehension why so many die simply because of their socio-economic class and we have allowed it.
Shame on all of us.
Ruta, thanks for this. Another reminder of how much work must be done by and for all of us!
May 5, 2009 1:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
When I saw the IPS headline "Viral Time Bomb Set to Explode," I thought they were talking about computer viruses, like when the Conficker virus was supposed to cause mayhem on April 1st.
If you spend too much time on the internet, you may start to believe that the whole world is made of metaphors.
May 5, 2009 1:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
But what's a meta for? You can't be against everything all your life. Well, you can, but...
May 6, 2009 7:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
I had no idea about this. Never heard about it. Such a terrible result from such good motives.
May 5, 2009 2:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
In defense of the WHO and something I've witnessed first hand, the WHO gives them proper instruction and equipment and then the "health depts" in these countries job out the work and sell the equipment given to them. When you're being paid virtually pennies per numbers of injections you may not be as scrupulous in protocol as you should be.
May 5, 2009 3:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
Exactly right!
The WHO doesn't make mistakes with dirty needles, but a lot of third-world governments like Egypt restrict how NGOs can operate in country, and insist on delivery to local service providers.
If the local staff is ridiculously underfunded or under-educated, or both, the whole system can get screwed up seven ways from backward, and that's what happened in Egypt.
But still...
This was a program that ran for 18 years, and there wasn't anything subtle about the mistakes they were making.
Somebody should have figured it out, in 18 years!
May 5, 2009 3:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
I don't know about that. Hepatitis C has many causes and the symptons presented often mimic other diseases. People can live a very long time with hepatitis without symptoms or symptoms that go away so it may have been difficult to make the connection - if you don't have the data, you don't have the data. Look how long it took them to find the genesis of AIDS.
(I'm not saying that WHO hasn't made some whoppers.)
May 5, 2009 3:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm not saying the WHO should have figured out Hepatitits C before 1982... the virus hadn't even been identified yet, anywhere, by anybody.
But re-using hypodermic needles is a separate question, and it doesn't really matter if there are a hundred unidentified viruses circulating, or zero.
We're not talking about some recent discovery... this is all about the germ theory of disease, which goes back 130 years to Robert Koch and Joseph Lister.
Little children know about germs!
So how does Egypt inject millions of people with dirty needles, and nobody notices for 18 years?
May 5, 2009 5:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
cargo cult is to religion as pretend medicine is to the best medicine?
May 5, 2009 6:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
I remember some doctors got on my bus in India in 1985 with open needles and tried to give me a vaccination. I knew well enough to refuse, take my chances with the cholera.
May 6, 2009 7:23 AM | Reply | Permalink
Have you compared the damage from bilharzia to the HepC rate?
US has 4 million infected, with a death rate of 10-20,000 annually. Worldwide number is 200 million, from Wiki.
May 5, 2009 8:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
Did you happen to read the linked article?
May 5, 2009 9:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
The figure 200 million is the highest estimate for "infected" individuals, meaning people who have antibodies for Hapatitis C. The figure 5.5 million in Egypt is for chronic carriers, and the comparable figure to 200 is about 10+.
To put it another way, Egypt has 1.2% of the world's population, and more than 5% of all cases of Hepatitis C, which suggests to me (and the WHO) that most Egyptians who suffer from chronic hepatitis were infected by injections with dirty needles, and...
My estimate of one million deaths was based on the difference between the expected and observed prevalence of Hepatitis C in Egypt.
May 5, 2009 9:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
Makes sense, thanks.
May 5, 2009 9:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
I probably should have made the original post clearer, but my brain just quit. One million people is an awful lot of people to die by having their bodies very slowly fill up with toxins.
Sometimes I feel like every problem is now so unthinkably big that we aren't even spectators any more.
No overview, no clue... just endless numbers that essentially convey nothing.
May 5, 2009 11:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
Too big to fail?
May 6, 2009 8:18 AM | Reply | Permalink
Meant that 200 million are infected. If US 4 mil yields 10,000/yr deaths, 200 million worldwide would be at least 500,000 annually.
May 5, 2009 8:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
Shame on whoever is to blame in Egypt.
Meanwhile in the US of A, thousands of people die from preventable communicable diseases spread by re-use of needles due to the interference of the religeous right in medical affairs. The right wingers think keeping junkies from getting access to clean needles will somehow keep them from getting high. Clearly all it does is force them to use dirty needles and increase the risk of HIV and HCV infection. The global medical community is of a single voice on this issue. Needle exchange is one of the best ways to slow the transmission of blood borne disease. Prohibiting needle exchange programs from reaching those who need the service and making possession of needles without a prescription a crime does more to promote unhealthy behavior than discourage it.
Shame on whoever is to blame in the US.
Some of us bleading heart liberals should remember to blead a few drops on our own soil.
HIV and HCV infection rates are out of hand here in the US. Not to take away from the suffering of those in other countries, but we're not doing so well here either.
May 6, 2009 11:44 AM | Reply | Permalink