Back in April when swine flu triggered its first wave of panic, authorities in Egypt acted quickly by wiping out the beasts that gave the virus its name. President Hosni Mubarak's Agriculture Ministry ordered all pigs in Cairo killed.
(Photo borrowed from New York Times -- thanks. People rounding up pigs in the cull.)
Rights groups raised concerns that minority Christians in the predominantly Muslim nation were being targeted in a discriminatory measure that attacked a livelihood Islam wrote-off as unclean. The pig owners, mostly from the Zabaleen minority, warned that the pig cull would have terrible consequences, and it now seems that they were exactly right.
Cairo is sinking under a rising mound of rotting garbage that the Zabaleen used to willingly collect, but since the slaughter of 300,000 pigs now have no reason to do so. "The problem is clear in the streets," spokesman for the Ministry of State for Environmental Affairs, Haitham Kamal was quoted as saying in the New York Times.
"The whole area is trash,"Ramadan Hediya, a supermarket delivery man in a low-income area of Cairo told the Times. "All the pathways are full of trash. When you open up your window to breathe, you find garbage heaps on the ground."
In what appears to be a staggering oversight, the Egyptian government apparently ignored the role of the Zabaleen Christians in Cairo as the defacto garbage collectors of the city when they ordered the pig cull. For more than half a century, the community, mostly based on the eastern cliffs at the edge of the city, provided a service by collecting rubbish from people's doorsteps to sell recyclables, and to harvest organic waste for pig-feed.
Killing the pigs "was the stupidest thing they (the government) ever did," Laila Iskandar Kamel chairwoman of a Cairo community develpment group told the New York Times.
"They killed the pigs, let them clean the city," former Zabaleen garbage collector Moussa Rateb told the Times.
Egypt has so far recorded some 800 cases of H1N1, included two deaths, but all of these appeared after the pig cull. The Times reported that in a system that has been in place since the late 1940s the Zabaleen associations were collecting around 6,000 tons of trash a day by the time of the slaughter, and 60 percent of that was food-waste given to their pigs.
Around 70,000 families lost their livelihood in the killings, according to Bloomberg, in an action that was labelled a mistake by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, who said there was no link between pigs and the transmission of the new flu-outbreak.
"No one took into consideration the economics, much less the environmental problems, " of the cull, Magdi Foud, whose pork industry business was wiped out, told Bloomberg.
Agriculture Minister Amin Abaza justified the slaughter, citing the fear of H5N1 bird-flu mixing with swine flu and also said, "we had been planning to get rid of the pigs for three years. The swine-flu fears gave us the opportunity," Bloomberg reported.
Meanwhile, Marzouka Beshir pointed to a pile of rotting garbage in a working class neighbourhood in Cairo and told AFP, "Look, that's where the swine flu is going to come from."
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