18 May 2017 – The WHO country office in Egypt, in collaboration with the Ministry of Health and Population, organized a joint workshop to review the injection safety draft policy.
The injection safety policy will guide health professionals to provide a safe injection and protect patients and health care providers from medical injuries. It will also help to raise awareness of the importance of promoting safe injection practices.
Unsafe injection practices are an international issue. With an estimated 16 thousand million injections administered annually in developing and transitional countries alone, the importance of promoting safe injection practices is unprecedented. Over the past few decades failures to follow safe injection practices have burdened many developing, as well as developed countries, with outbreaks of infectious diseases.
It is reported that unsafe practices and excessive injections cause more than 32% of hepatitis B and more than 40% of hepatitis C globally according to the WHO advocacy booklet on the "Safe Injection Global Network" produced in 2011.
