Wednesday, January 31, 2007

The Bird flu in Egypt

Of course you may have read the news that the Bird flu aka H5N1 returned to strike back in Egypt . You may have read also the news that several people died because of it , and you may have read too the most disturbing news concerning  the H5N1 that it was evolved in Egypt , new strain of the Avian found in Egypt that is resistant to the antiviral drug tamiful , you know the vaccine the minister of health was always speaking about as the savior of Egypt from the Avian flu , well it turned out that now it has no use.

To  say the truth the minister of health and his ministry are not to be blamed this time about this ,in fact the ministry of health said from couple of months that Egypt has about 5 years to get rid from that virus.

The problem is in the people themselves

The problem is in the domestic poultry in the homes in the country side and in the low working class.You see in the Egyptian country side , women usually have domestic poultry raised in the homes , they use them as food and also as for business by selling the eggs.The Egyptian farmers ,peasants and workers find especially from country side it much cheaper to raise poultry in their homes than to buy them with prices they can't afford.

In fact if you see the location of the epidemic you will find it in the populated country side areas in the Delta where the family members number from one mother and father exceeds 5 , living all in narrow place with poultry all over the place.you know in one of the articles I read I guess in the New York times where they described the place where the infected family "33 members" lived in as a compound , well it is not a compound as you think in the western term , but it is more like houses so close to each other from one family or two or even three ,mostly are related to each other through marriage . Also these compounds are not that clean to the degree to fight back this virus .Also the Poultry are put in open places not closed ones ,so any immigrant bird infected with the virus would come and sit with for a while to spread the virus in simple terms

Thanks to that epidemic the poultry industry in Egypt especially the retail poultry industry is destroyed , you can not find any chicken seller anymore , only big farms is dominating the industry ,also imported chicken farms from Saudi Arabia. Our old poultry seller ,famous one in Zamalak turned his shop after decades to a Kabab seller . Yet despite the government orders some poultry sellers sell chicken in secret , at least some I know I remember that once when we tried to order pigeons to be stuffed from our seller and it was like buying drugs !!

It is unfair what the government did to the poultry sellers in my opinion , it is totally unfair but on the other hand the H5N1 is deadly , and in a country like Egypt thank God thousand times that the people who died and got infected were less than expected .

By the way it was the joke of the soceity and the people that for the  first time Egypt reached a high rank in something internationaly

We became in the second place in the world that got Avian flu after Veitnam, a great achievement to be added to the achievement our fine government

2 comments:

  1. iam Egyptian doctor i work in Scotland at the moment as anaesthesiologist ( put people to sleep during surgery). when the bird flu start to strike in Europe about 5-6 month ago, they started to give us a course of what we shuold do when the bird flu strike. I was so upset and frustrated worried so much about Egypt afret this course,first, i releaized the magnutide of the problem and how the bird flu may destroy country economy and takes so many lives. However,i phoned some doctor friends in Egypt no one whatever thier speciality know anything about this virus, noone cares, i think the egyptian governement as usual and ministry of health do not take the matter seriously, they only focused on the economy.

    As far as i know bird flu is disastour for human lives and eceonmy (the old version of virus can transmmit from birds to humans, may be these new starins my tranfer from human to human).

    Ministry of health in Egypt deals with the situation in very old, bercuratic fashion.

    According to what i know they even don't do the simple things, health education, proper isolation measures---- etc, iam almost sure that, there are so many people died of bird flu and noone knows anything about them.

    I am not to optimstic but i think the situation will get worse and the governement will just tell us everything is pink pink pink.

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  2. @of course anonymous they care only on the economy and the benefit of the big farms owners members in NDP.YOu know things can be much worst than it is ,if the WHO didn't put on eye in Egypt believe me they won't care at all.

    The danger is the new strain as I read they evolving very quickly and you hinted
    and I will share your doubts that the death toll in Egypt is more than announced ,due to the fact that the government long record in lying and twisting reality

    It is both on the ministry of health and the people ,the people in the country side do n't realize the dangerous even with all the media ,you call a health education ,well there is enough education there in the first place

    The ministry of health should take care from its hopsitals ,I remember I saw on TV the turkish hospital where they put the infected people in , and it was so clean , people should recovered , but here look to the public hospital

    The minister of Health now is surrounded many problems , and he is not bad like the previous ones ,but he is paying the mistakes of the old ones ,not alone we all are paying it

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