Take a bow, Egypt

We're number 2! We're number 2!

I'm sitting on my couch catching up on the latest Influenza A information to prepare for an interview I'm giving on Tuesday. It's for a campus-affiliated news magazine, but I still don't want to look like an idiot. Or, you know, start throwing chairs.

[Spoiler alert to any of my students: skip the next paragraph! And why aren't you working on your final?]

I've also been working with some of my colleagues on a short set of questions to give students to figure out whether they've actually learned anything from our class. We delocalized the situation - Egypt's not the only country screwing up, after all - but my fervent hope is in 30 years, one of my students will be running some sort of Supreme Council here and will make the right call.

I found this article from Discover magazine on the the five worst governmental responses to the Influenza A outbreak. It's been a few weeks since this article ran, so maybe it's time to resurvey the field.

Egypt came in at #2, behind (ahem) Mexico. Here's the shout-out:

2. Slaughtering Every Pig in Your Country
Second place goes to Egypt, whose government decided that since the virus originated from pigs, the best way to keep it out is to kill every pig in your borders. So that's what they did. This week, Health Ministry workers began slaughtering the roughly 300,000 pigs unfortunate enough to reside there—a number that would have been far higher were Egypt not a predominantly Muslim country.

Unfortunately for the government—and the pigs, and their farmers, and the Egyptian citizens who will gain nothing from this pointless massacre—killing pigs has absolutely no effect on the transmission of the virus. "The crisis today is in transmission from human to human. It has nothing to do with pigs," U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization Chief Veterinary Officer Joseph Domenech told the AP. Though it's certainly a good week to buy pork chops in Cairo.

Wrong, buddy! You can never buy pork chops in Cairo! At least, this trained observer has never noticed any. I don't think even Gourmet Egypt goes so far, and for sure the very few places in Cairo that sold pork pulled the products (which would have brought their weight in ex-pat gold, I don't doubt).

And yet, and yet ... Egypt is still going ahead with its pig slaughter in the face of international ridicule. Way to stick to those idiot-guns, my dears. In their defense, the government is trying to spin the whole thing as a public health initiative. Check out this article from Al-Ahram; my favorite part is where the unhygenic filthy rotting pig corpses - haram! - are shown to be the victims of vehicular pigslaughter. My question to those spinsters is, oh, really? Then why now? Why not a year ago? A year from now? Five years from now? And most importantly, do you think we're stupid???

The kicker, of course, is that so many of us are ignorant. I can't figure out why people have started trusting the government now, of all times. Convenient adherence to religious doctrine and economic expedience (can't really imagine to whom)?

Here's a quick case in point. Last week I attended a conference here in Cairo that vacillated between being a useful discussion among peers to a social-scientist-hippy-lovefest (no offense intended to any rigorous social scientists out there, of course). I held it together pretty well, I think, by not participating in many discussions.

I finally blew my stack in the afternoon on the second day. I was in a break-out session with a few people, and the topic of scientific thinking and the flu outbreak came up. Someone (erm, it might've been me) pointed out that this current event is the perfect case study for our students. I was interrupted by an Egyptian doctor. Let me say that again: doctor. She said, "Well, but you really have to contextualize this issue. I mean, we are in Egypt."

Mouth engaged before brain and I slammed back, "I don't care what country or what context you're talking about. PIGS - DON'T - CAUSE - THIS - FLU. All this context business is nonsense - you might as well throw out all the red paintings in Egypt, that'll have the same effect on the spread of this disease." Fortunately cooler heads prevailed before she could respond (and I, no doubt, could throw a chair).

Yikes. I'd better calm down before this interview on Tuesday.