A History of Hepatitis C in Egypt

FAIN: FT-248958-16

Jennifer Leslee Derr
Regents of the University of California, Santa Cruz (Santa Cruz, CA 95064-1077)

Archival and field work in Cairo and Geneva towards a history of the hepatitis C virus in Egypt.

With an infection rate of between 14 and 22% of the total population, the incidence of hepatitis C virus in Egypt is the highest of any single country in the world. The Making of an Epidemic: Hepatitis C in Egypt will trace the history of the disease in Egypt, focusing on the experiences of scientists, doctors, and patients, the virus' entanglements with the Egyptian state and medical establishment, and the story that the epidemic tells about global biomedicine in the second half of the twentieth century. Consisting of six book length chapters, the manuscript will begin with the virus' spread through a nationwide treatment campaign for the parasitic infection schistosomiasis organized by the Egyptian government and the World Health Organization. It will then chart the experiences of those suffering from the infection, before the virus' identification. The final two chapters of the manuscript will detail the epidemic's trajectory since its 1989 discovery.