Posted on 09/20/2009 1:30:27 AM PDT by snowsislander
CAIRO — It is unlikely anyone has ever come to this city and commented on how clean the streets are. But this litter-strewn metropolis is now wrestling with a garbage problem so severe it has managed to incite its weary residents and command the attention of the president.
“The problem is clear in the streets,” said Haitham Kamal, a spokesman for the Ministry of State for Environmental Affairs. “There is a strict and intensive effort now from the state to address this issue.”
But the crisis should not have come as a surprise.
When the government killed all the pigs in Egypt this spring — in what public health experts said was a misguided attempt to combat swine flu — it was warned the city would be overwhelmed with trash.
The pigs used to eat tons of organic waste. Now the pigs are gone and the rotting food piles up on the streets of middle-class neighborhoods like Heliopolis and in the poor streets of communities like Imbaba.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
"We don't have enough pigs and goats running loose in our cities, so how are we going to deal with our trash?!?!"
Yep, the best thing that every happened to Baghdad was the clean running water and the sewer system American Troops installed, they are now the envy of the entire middle east
I lived in Cairo for years and pigs are an improvement!
Sounds like an ideal situation to grow the plague.
And if plague broke out in Cairo, would anyone really give a damn?
“Yep, the best thing that every happened to Baghdad was the clean running water and the sewer system American Troops installed, they are now the envy of the entire middle east”
I understand ME countries vary in wealth, but WTF, why don’t more pay to put in their own doggone systems? Heard the glory of Dubai has sewer lines to nowhere and poop trucks have to empty the septic tanks, then drive far away, queue in line for hours to tip the load?... Boggles the mind.
This is our future?
Sounds like modern Americans. No money for necessities, plenty of money for luxuries.
“belatedly”...yeah my foot. Of course, this little move wasn’t so much about pigs, it was about wiping out the Coptic Christians in Egypt who farm them.
On cat purges at the time of the Black death:
“Since many equated the Black Death with God’s wrath against sin, and that cats were often considered in league with the Devil thanks to their aloof and independent nature, cats were killed in masses. Had this bias toward cats not existed, local rodent populations could have been kept down, lessening the spread of plague-infected fleas from host to host.”
Hard not to see the same bias toward pigs in the middle east, with possibly the same results.
Let them eat pork.
Right up there with Mao’s campaign against the sparrows.
Looks like dogs, sheep, and rams are valiantly trying to take on the garbage.
They killed the wrong Pigs....looks like the NYslTimes have finally found the perfect faux journalist,
Michael SLACKMAN.
Basic infrastructure, missing. Meanwhile just like on the Titanic, the band plays on. Don’t we all just love the politics of unintended consequences. In case anyone has forgotten, the unintended consequences are MAN made.
Didn’t Chairman Mao order the killing of all pet cats. The rat population exploded.
‘Couldn’t happen to a nicer group of people.
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