Sweif, who is six months pregnant with her first child, boasts that she has convinced her husband to sell the family car in order to put aside money for the treatment she feels the army can provide.
“I am sure we will need money for this,” she said, speaking from a market near her home in Cairo’s Midan Kit Kat neighborhood. “We will need money to pay for the treatment and also for the [bribes] to get on the list of those to be treated.”
She believes that a secret list is being composed of those who will get first priority to the army’s new cure, and wants to ensure that her name is included. While the government-run institute in which she currently receives treatments for free has told her they can help prevent the virus from transferring to her baby, she appears to much prefer a cure, as promised by the army.
“I want to be without this virus — only our army can give me that,” she says
On the outskirts of Cairo’s Six of October suburb, Metwaly also hopes to receive the new army treatment. He holds up a file in which his various scans and test results are collected — proof, he says, that he has been jumping through every bureaucratic hoop and still remains without treatment.
“Every time I go to the doctor I have to take two or three modes of transportation, and it takes three to four hours, and still I get no treatment, only more tests,” said Metwaly, who moves gingerly and winces as he sits up. He said he only discovered he had hepatitis C a year and a half ago, and it is already well advanced.
“I heard about the army, that they have a cure, and my hope is to get it,” said Metwaly. “I don’t know any information or details about it. I heard they created a device, and I can only hope my name is on the list of those who will get treatment. … I am not bothering myself about bribes, or trying to get insider help, because it won’t happen. I can only hope that everyone will get the treatment.”
He, like many, thinks it is the government’s job to provide a cure for hep C. The virus’s high prevalence in Egypt is in part due to a mass state campaign in the 1960s and 1970s to treat schistosomiasis (also known as bilharzia), a water-borne disease that was at one time endemic in Egypt. The treatment campaigns, which involved repeated injections, used the same needles repeatedly and did not properly sterilize their equipment, leading to a massive spread of hepatitis C throughout Egypt.
Since then, education and treatment options have worsened the situation. And since the disease can lie dormant for decades before causing any symptoms, many people spread it by sharing razors or toothbrushes without realizing that they were infected.
New treatments are emerging for hep C every year, but most are expensive and not 100% effective, leaving many to pin their hopes to the pipe dreams created by the army’s statement.