Egypt launches '100 Million Healthy Lives' national health screening drive

In October 2018, Egypt launched "100 Million Healthy Lives" (known in Arabic as 100 Million Seha), a nationwide public health campaign led by the Ministry of Health and Population under President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi's government.

The first phase aimed to screen around 50 million adults for hepatitis C, along with checks for non-communicable diseases such as diabetes and high blood pressure. People who tested positive for hepatitis C were offered treatment, which the state provided free of charge using low-cost direct-acting antiviral drugs.

The campaign mattered because Egypt had long had one of the world's highest rates of hepatitis C, a liver infection that can lead to cirrhosis and liver cancer. The spread was linked in part to mass treatment campaigns for schistosomiasis, a parasitic disease, carried out decades earlier with unsterilised needles. Screening at this scale was meant to find hidden infections and cut the national burden of the disease. The drive later became the foundation for the progress the World Health Organization has since highlighted.