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Rebecca Voelker

JAMA. 2000;283:1816.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Decades of mass injections to treat schistosomiasis in Egypt apparently created the world's largest iatrogenic spread of a blood-borne pathogen—in this case, hepatitis C virus (HCV).

Since ancient times, Egypt has been home to extensive schistosomiasis transmission. In the 1920s, after injection of potassium antimony tartrate was discovered to be effective against the blood flukes that cause the illness, mass inoculation campaigns began in adults and children older than 6 years. These campaigns, in which millions of intravenous injections were given with inadequately sterilized equipment, continued until the 1980s, when oral medications became widely available.

To determine whether Egypt's current high prevalence of chronic HCV infection—15% to 20%—is related to the injection campaigns, researchers from Egypt, Switzerland, and the United States analyzed 25 years of data from the Egyptian Ministry of Health. Their analysis showed that in Egyptians aged 15 years and older, the prevalence of HCV antibodies . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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