Kenya’s next step towards hepatitis elimination is to design a health system that uses routine patient encounters to enable earlier diagnosis, timely treatment, and stronger prevention.
By Taofik Oloruko-Oba, Country Manager, Kenya and Head of the East Africa Network, Roche Diagnostics
Kenya’s hardest hepatitis question is not whether people have heard of the disease. It is how to ensure that, when people pass through antenatal clinics, HIV services, outpatient departments, laboratories and chronic disease clinics, hepatitis can be recognised as part of their care where appropriate.
As the world marks World Hepatitis Day 2026 under the theme “Hepatitis – Let’s Break It Down,” Kenya must confront a practical truth: hepatitis is not only a testing challenge. It is also a systems-integration challenge within routine healthcare. This matters because the burden remains urgent. The World Health Organization’s Global Hepatitis Report 2024 estimates that 287 million people were living with chronic hepatitis B or C worldwide. Together, the two infections claimed approximately 1.34 million lives that year, largely through cirrhosis and liver cancer.
The burden is particularly severe in Africa. According to WHO African, the Region accounted for 68 per cent of new hepatitis B infections in 2024, while only 17 per cent of newborns in the region received a timely hepatitis B birth-dose vaccination. Africa CDC has also reported that fewer than 5 per cent of Africans living with hepatitis B have been screened and less than 1 per cent are receiving treatment. For hepatitis C, approximately 13 per cent have been screened and only 3 per cent treated, despite the availability of curative therapy. These figures are often interpreted as evidence that people living with hepatitis are difficult to reach. That is only partly true.
Every day, Kenyans interact with the health system through maternal care, HIV services, primary healthcare, blood donation programmes and clinics managing conditions such as hypertension and diabetes. Many are already speaking to a healthcare worker, undergoing clinical assessment, or having blood drawn.
The patient is present. The health worker is present. In many facilities, some laboratory capacity is present. What is frequently missing is not commitment from frontline teams, but a system-level prompt that helps them identify whether the patient should be assessed for hepatitis risk, tested where clinically appropriate and connected to care if the result is positive.
Kenya has already begun moving in the right direction. In March 2026, the Ministry of Health launched 20 documents under the Integrated Guidelines for the Prevention, Treatment and Management of HIV, Syphilis and Hepatitis B. The initiative reflects a broader shift towards integrated, people-centred healthcare. The next challenge is to translate that policy direction into consistent practice across counties and facilities. This is what “breaking down hepatitis” should mean in Kenya: dismantling the silos that separate hepatitis prevention, diagnosis, and treatment from everyday care.
Patients do not experience healthcare as a collection of disease-specific programmes. They arrive as whole people, with overlapping risks, symptoms, and needs. A system organised entirely around separate diseases can overlook those connections. A system organised around the patient encounter is more likely to identify risk early, diagnose infection sooner and guide the patient towards the appropriate next step.
Integration does not mean testing every patient at every visit. Nor should it mean placing additional pressure on already stretched healthcare workers. It should mean giving them the tools, prompts, supplies, training and referral pathways that make the right action easier to take within the realities of their workload.
In Kenya, implementation should begin where the clinical and public-health rationale is strongest and where established pathways can be adapted. These include antenatal and maternal health services, HIV care, services for people with symptoms or evidence of liver disease, care for populations at higher risk of infection, and facilities already operating relevant laboratory platforms.
Blood services also offer an important opportunity. Screening donated blood protects recipients, but the intervention should not end there. Donors with reactive results require clear communication, confirmatory testing where appropriate and supported referral into care.
Integration must therefore extend beyond the initial test. A positive screening result should be supported by clear systems for confirmation, counselling, clinical assessment, monitoring, or treatment. The same applies to close contacts who could benefit from testing or hepatitis B vaccination, and who need pathways that make follow-up practical for patients and providers alike.
Making integration work will require more than a policy statement. Healthcare workers need simple clinical algorithms, reliable supplies, appropriate training and clearly defined referral pathways. Laboratory systems must be able to return results efficiently, while health information systems should capture whether patients complete the journey from screening to diagnosis and care.
Digital or paper-based prompts could help clinicians identify patients who meet testing criteria. Facilities could establish standard referral arrangements so that patients are not left to navigate an unfamiliar system alone. Counties could also use routine data to identify where people are being lost between screening, confirmation, and treatment.
The case for action becomes even stronger when hepatitis is viewed as a cancer-prevention issue. Chronic hepatitis B and C can progress silently for years before causing cirrhosis or liver cancer. A missed diagnosis today may become a far more complex and costly case of advanced liver disease tomorrow.
Kenya has shown through its HIV and cervical cancer responses that prevention and early detection become more effective when public awareness, clinical practice and health-system pathways move in the same direction. Viral hepatitis needs the same practical focus, not as another isolated campaign, but as a condition deliberately incorporated into relevant points of care.
The tools are available. Hepatitis B vaccination provides highly effective protection. Long-term antiviral treatment can control chronic hepatitis B and reduce the risk of severe liver disease. Short-course treatment can cure more than 95 per cent of hepatitis C infections. The harder task is ensuring that these tools reach people at the moments when they are already seeking care. The path forward should be practical and sequenced: identify priority entry points, equip healthcare workers with straightforward protocols, use existing laboratory capacity efficiently, secure reliable referral and treatment pathways, and collect the data needed to improve implementation.
Kenya will not eliminate hepatitis through awareness campaigns or stand-alone testing drives alone. Lasting progress will come when every relevant patient encounter is treated as a considered opportunity to prevent infection, identify risk, diagnose disease, provide counselling, initiate treatment, or make an effective referral.
That is the barrier Kenya must break down: not simply low testing, but the gaps in routine systems that allow people who are already within reach to move through care without being identified, counselled or connected to treatment.
When hepatitis remains outside routine care, elimination remains out of reach. When it is integrated thoughtfully into patient pathways, Kenya can help frontline teams turn everyday healthcare encounters into earlier diagnoses, stronger links to treatment and better long-term outcomes for patients and families.
Sources
- WHO World Hepatitis Day 2026 – “Hepatitis: Let’s Break It Down”
https://www.who.int/campaigns/world-hepatitis-day/2026 - WHO Global Hepatitis Report 2024
https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240091672 - WHO Africa – Hepatitis health topic page
https://www.afro.who.int/health-topics/hepatitis - Africa CDC – Joint action plans launched to tackle viral hepatitis in Africa
https://africacdc.org/news-item/joint-action-plans-launched-to-tackle-viral-hepatitis-in-africa/ - Kenya Integrated Guidelines for Prevention, Treatment and Management of HIV, Sexually Transmitted Infections and Viral Hepatitis 2026
https://www.prepwatch.org/resources/kenya-integrated-guidelines-for-prevention-treatment-and-management-of-hiv-sexually-transmitted-infections-and-viral-hepatitis-2026/ - WHO Hepatitis C Fact Sheet
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/hepatitis-c