In Armenia, MSF first worked in the country in 1988 to respond to medical needs following the Spitak earthquake, before treating people with drug-resistant tuberculosis with new, effective drugs.
During the late 1990s and early 2000s, we provided medical and therapeutic care to children with a physical and/or mental disability, in a special education complex in Yerevan; this project was closed in 2004.
More recently, we focused on implementing new regimens for patients with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) in Armenia, which has one of the highest rates of the disease in the world. We had been working with the national tuberculosis programme in Yerevan, the capital, since 2005, before implementing our own programme to treat drug-resistant TB in 2015. This programme, which also included medical research, saw patients treated with bedaquiline and delamanid, two of the newest drugs to treat TB; Armenia was one of the first countries in the world to authorise their use. We handed over our remaining TB activities to the national health authorities and closed our projects in 2019.
In 2022, we launched a project to provide hepatitis C treatment to people living in vulnerable circumstances, including prisoners. The project offers access to timely screening, diagnosis, and treatment for hepatitis C disease through a simplified ‘one-stop-shop’ service model in the Arshakunyats Polyclinic in Yerevan. We also worked in Nagorno-Karabakh 2023, a self-proclaimed republic internationally recognised as belonging to Azerbaijan, but which is home to many ethnic Armenians. We offered mental health support to people displaced in the region fleeing the attack during that time.
In 2022, Médecins Sans Frontières started a hepatitis C programme in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. In 2023, we also ran a mental health care support project for people in the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.
