H5N1 deaths: 'Poultry innocent'

2008-01-11 08:29

Damietta - In a dark and muddy alley in the Nile Delta town of Damietta, where Egypt's latest fatal bird flu victim Hanem Atwa Ibrahim lived, inhabitants fear the authorities more than the virus.

"It was the will of God that she died. The chickens had nothing to do with it," says Husseini Ahmed Amine, 54, a furniture maker who employed a son of the dead woman, who was aged 50.

Most of the inhabitants of the Ezbet el-Lahm district paid scant attention to the government's campaign against the H5N1 virus which, after a summer respite, killed four people, all women, in the space of a week over New Year.

Health Minister Hatem al-Gabali warned in December against "slackness in the preventive measures taken to fight bird flu especially as winter approaches".

43 cases of human bird flu

But here, as elsewhere in the country, distrust of the government was widespread.

A national campaign to slaughter possibly infected birds was more often than not seen as just another threat from authorities in which people had no faith.

Ibrahim's death was the 19th fatality in Egypt, where there had been a total of 43 cases of bird flu in humans since the disease was first recorded here in February 2006. Women and children had borne the brunt of the virus because of their role in taking care of domestic fowl.

"Listen to me: all these chickens, they don't kill them, they sell them off or eat them," says Hanane Essayyed Farhat, 42, a mother of four selling her poultry a few dozen metres from the latest victim's home.

"The state and businessmen profit from bird flu. It's all just about trying to get people to buy frozen chickens. That way they'll make money off our back," she added.

Ducks, geese quack from cages

The authorities recommend eating factory-farmed chicken whose origins could be traced. Almost two years since H5N1 appeared in Egypt, the north African country had become one of the most affected countries in the world.

But despite a government ban on raising poultry on rooftops - an age-old tradition in Egypt - chicken, ducks and geese continued to squawk and quack from cages on most of this district's rooftops, alongside a multitude of pigeon coops.

According to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation, Egypt and Indonesia were the countries most likely to see the virus mutate into a form that was contagious among humans, because of people's close contact with poultry.

It was a challenge to get people to stop raising and eating poultry in a country, where meat was a luxury for most, and birds could be fed cheaply on food leftovers.

Amine said: "I don't believe in bird flu. We look after our poultry, nothing can happen to them. What's more their factory chicken has no taste, you can't even tell it's chicken."

- AFP