By Salama A Salama Only now the government is beginning to realise that the filth it has allowed to go unchecked is here to stay. We live in a puddle of sewage, breathe nasty air, and eat polluted food. As sewage pipes leak into drinking water, we're catching all types of illnesses, home grown as well as imported. First it was bird flu, then swine flu and what have you. In more orderly societies, people don't panic as much as we do. Even people who catch a potentially deadly flu react soberly. They rest for a few days, take their medicine, and generally get better. They avoid crowded places, get some fresh air, and wash their hands with decent regularity. The World Health Organisation has issued a warning saying that the next wave of swine flu would be deadlier than anything we've seen so far. To which we reacted with a barrage of laws we have no intention of implementing. Our leaders don't seem to appreciate the fact that the garbage gathering in our streets is bad for our health, as well as the leaky sewage system and poor drinking water. We can pass laws by the dozen, but we don't seem able to look at a problem from all its aspects. The biggest source of pollution in Egypt is the government. Of all Arab countries, Egypt is perhaps the only one that has streets piled high with garbage. It is the only country that has failed to get government departments or civil society, private or public firms, to take away the garbage. In smarter societies, people make money by recycling garbage. Here, municipal authorities leave garbage to pile up high with no thought for tomorrow. Only a small proportion of garbage is carried off by garbage companies to landfills on the outskirts of the capital. The rest is left to fester. The swine flu, which the government failed to address, led to more garbage uncollected. Call it the "revenge of the swine" if you may. The government decided that getting rid of the flu was best achieved by killing thousands of pigs owned by garbage collectors. The flu in question is spread mainly by human- to-human contact, and yet the government killed the pigs, depriving thousands of garbage collectors from a main source of income. Now there are no pigs left to eat our garbage. The garbage collectors take the disposable part of the garbage -- the plastic, the cartons, and the metals -- and leave us the rest. So we're drowning in our own garbage. The government has set up committees to look into pollution and make legislation to fight it. But pollution has already penetrated everything, the animate and inanimate, the fauna and the flora, the water and the air. And don't forget the pollution of the soul. To put it mildly, neglect has gotten out of hand. Have you noticed how the ministries of agriculture and irrigation fight about drainage water? Have you noticed that the Cairo governorate cannot give us a good reason why the garbage is piling up? Is it that the companies are cheating us, or the garbage collectors losing interest in their career? What we see today is an administrative system on the verge of collapse and a government that cannot think ahead. When the flu epidemic finally hits us, I am not sure we'll have the energy to resist it.
