Health

The BBC has a somewhat alarming story about exponentially higher rates of birth defects in Fallujah in the years following the U.S. invasion.

That's what the story claims, at least. But there's not much analytical rigor in the piece, which doesn't define what it means by "birth defect" and presents mostly anecdotal data. The topic deserves further study before we conclude there's a crisis.

(Update appended. -Evan 12/22/09)

The Israeli government has acknowledged that it harvested organs from the dead bodies of Palestinians without the permission of their families in the 1980s and '90s.

The official announcement, from the Israeli Defense Forces, came after Dr. Yehuda Hiss -- the former head of Israel's forensic institute -- admitted in a TV documentary that he took corneas, hearts, bones and skin from dead Palestinians. Hiss said the practice ended in 2000.

"This activity ended a decade ago and does not happen any longer," the IDF said in a statement.

Israel's ministry of health also issued a perfunctory statement responding to the documentary. It blamed the unauthorized harvesting on "unclear guidelines," according to The Guardian.

That's the word from Gaza's health ministry, which confirmed today that five people have been infected with swine flu. Authorities are concerned about a possible outbreak, because the Gaza government only has about 1,000 doses of H1N1 vaccine -- not enough to vaccinate Gaza's 8,000 health care workers, let alone the general population.

Officials in Gaza blame the shortage on the Hamas-Fatah rivalry: They say the Palestinian Authority government in the West Bank has more vaccine, but refuses to send additional doses.

Gaza's medical infrastructure is in tatters because of the years-long Israeli embargo -- though, ironically, the embargo is also responsible for keeping the virus out of Gaza until now.

You'll recall that Majlis correspondent Patrick Friedel reported on this nearly two weeks ago.

By Patrick Friedel

The temperature is dropping in Cairo, and the sneezing and coughing Cairenes are all concerned about the Swine Flu (H1N1).

That's understandable. It takes only one visit to Cairo to realize it is a petri dish of germs. The transportation system is at a breaking point, garbage litters the streets, and the countless coffee shops offer passed-around shisha pipes to their patrons.

Egypt's government is hardly in a position to offer a solution to the first two problems, but they are attempting to manage the latter issue by prohibiting shisha at public cafes. (Editor's note: The Egyptian government could be said to have contributed to the overflowing trash problem by culling its population of garbage-eating pigs, in response to swine flu fears. -Evan)

Shisha is a staple of Egyptian culture. It is flavored tobacco that is smoked through a water pipe. There are many flavors, but most cafes offer only two brands: light Apple flavored tobacco and maasil. Maasil is for the hardcore lot only. It is unflavored and packs a wallop. You have been warned.

As far as I can tell, the ban started last Tuesday and is only in effect on the main streets - particularly downtown. Those café owners able to afford bribing the police do so, and those that cannot are closing shop. Unfortunately, my favorite café, Mushrebeya, falls into the latter category and has shut down. The owner told me it will renovate and reopen as a tourism agency.

Great, I thought. I am losing my favorite watering hole and getting another tourism agency. There are already three agencies doing business across the street.

It has been hard to get a solid beat on the shisha situation here. No shop owner wants to tell their customers that there will not be shisha available, or that the police are enforcing a ban. Shisah is their livelihood. As a result, it has been difficult to understand what the government is doing and how the shops are handling the situation.

The Egyptian daily, Al Ahram, has yet to report anything regarding the ban.

If the ban is enforced, it would do wonders to prevent the spread of H1N1. Most cafes only give a cursory pipe-water change after each use, leaving all those germs from previous users readily available for the next smoker.

The drawbacks are numerous, though. The innumerable cafes across Egypt will suffer a large drop in business. More generally, this is a problem because shisha is a cultural cornerstone of Cairene life. It is more than habit-forming drug; it is a social release valve for the deluge of under/unemployed Egyptian men. I wonder how this will affect the temperament of the local men and young men in such a desperate economic time.

I hope to learn more about this issue and its impact. In the meantime, I am stocking-up on shisha coals and tobacco. Otherwise, it is going to be a long winter in Cairo.

Friedel is a 2007 graduate of the University of Iowa, studied abroad at the American University in Cairo from 2005-06 and recently returned to Cairo to study Arabic.

McClatchy's Inside Iraq blog reports that the Mansour school, one of the more upscale schools in Baghdad, is closed because of swine flu fears.

So are 2,500 other schools, according to the New York Times.

"Marriage is like a besieged citadel," a columnist wrote recently in Al-Ahram, "those outside want to enter it, while those inside are looking for a way out."

According to a recently released study, more and more Egyptians appear to be looking for that way out. The study, the subject of an article on the National's Web site today, shows that 84,430 Egyptian couples divorced in 2008, an 8.4 percent increase from the year before. Additionally, there are now 13 million Egyptians aged 30 or older who have never been married at all, according to the study, released by the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics.

For a conservative, family-oriented society such as Egypt's, that 13 million number is surprising - it represents a fifth of the entire population over 15. If you slice off 15- to 29-year-olds and consider that a large majority of Egyptian seniors (65 and up) have probably been married at some point, you're talking about a huge swath of young and middle-aged Egyptians who've never been hitched - probably more than a third of citizens ages 30 to 65. That rate would rival or exceed the corresponding percentage of never-married Americans.

In today's edition, we move past definitions and start getting into the good stuff - figuring out exactly how screwed the Arab world really is. First up in the cavalcade of depressing facts: Chapter Two of the Arab Human Development Report, which focuses on environmental threats to human security in the region.

First, a brief reminder about the 2009 AHDR: It's all about "human security." We covered the definition of that term in Part One. By approaching the Arab world from the point of view of human security - the problems confronting everyday citizens, rather than the state as a whole - the authors hope to address the roots of a wealth of problems in today's globalized world. Now, let's get started.

Bashar al-Assad, the president of a country where 60 percent of adult men smoke, just announced... a smoking ban (عربي). (Seriously.)

The ban applies to all public places -- schools, shops, restaurants, public transport -- and also to meetings, conferences and other gatherings. Anyone flouting the ban faces a SYP2,000 (US$50) fine. Restaurant and bar owners that want to allow smoking need to provide a separate "well-ventilated area" for smokers.

Assad's decree also bans the sale of toys and food that look like cigarettes, and places new restrictions on tobacco advertising.

Is there an Arabic translation for "nanny state"?

A friend of the Majlis brought to my attention yesterday a great story from the Media Line (prepare for this headline): "Syria's Blogosphere Explodes with Competing Campaigns For and Against Masturbation."

According to Media Line writer Benjamin Joffe-Walt, a "lonely" 23-year-old Syrian blogger and marketing student named Fadl Otmaz Sibai set off the online debate with a Sept. 3 post calling upon his fellow Muslims to stop their "secret habit."

I'm generally loathe to give the House of Saud credit for anything, but this is commendable:

Saudi Arabia has announced that everyone arriving for the annual pilgrimage to Mecca in November will have to swallow a dose of oral polio vaccine under the eyes of health officials.

Polio still exists in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and in Muslim-majority areas of Nigeria and India, because of fear that the polio vaccine is actually a drug to sterilize Muslim women. Saudi's vaccination campaign won't eliminate the disease. But doing it in Makkah might help to convince some suspicious Muslims that the vaccine is just that: a vaccine.

(Not that there isn't a little self-interest at work here, too: Saudi Arabia certainly doesn't want a polio outbreak on its hands.)

Egypt's decision to cull its entire pig population as a swine flu defense tactic has backfired in one very smelly way: The unofficial garbage collectors who used to use the pigs to clean up organic waste are now forced to let garbage rot in the streets.

Egypt continues to overreact to swine flu, which I take as an indication that the government has no confidence its public health system can handle a real outbreak.

The government has already slaughtered 200,000 pigs and agreed to hajj visa restrictions. Now it's also giving students a few extra weeks of summer vacation.

Egypt has ordered foreign schools and universities to close until early next month and local schools to delay opening until then over worries about the spread of swine flu, a health ministry official said on Wednesday.

Not such a bad deal for foreign students, I guess. AUC started classes on Sept. 6, so foreign students are already in Egypt; the closure gives them a few weeks to travel. I'm slightly jealous.

Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, is trying to convince worried hajj pilgrims that the swine flu isn't that dangerous. The Saudi government is concerned that this year's hajj won't be well-attended, costing the kingdom a lot of money.

Al-Masry Al-Youm has another sad story today about Egypt's decaying infrastructure -- this time, overflowing sewers in the Giza neighborhoods near the pyramids.

"We suffer from this problem several times each year, not only during Ramadan," said Huriya Ali, an elderly resident whose ground floor apartment has become immersed in sewage water. Lying on her bed, she added, "I'm paralyzed and therefore cannot mop up the floors. So my son and neighbors help me clean up the mess each day during Ramadan."

Residents say the utility company rarely answers its phone, and when it finally does send trucks to clean up the sewage, the drivers charge residents LE100-200 (roughly US$20-40) for the privilege. Sadly, if you've lived in Egypt, none of this will come as a surprise.

I enjoy the occasional shisha -- not so occasional when I lived in Cairo -- so I'm always thrilled to read stories like this.

The Centre for Tobacco Control Research found that a half-hour shisha session exposed the individual to carbon monoxide levels equivalent at least to smoking four or five cigarettes.

[...] At worst, shisha smoking could be 400 to 450 times as harmful as cigarettes, she said. The level of intake varied with differences in smokers' inhalations.

Apparently breathing in high levels of carbon monoxide puts you at greater risk for heart disease. So if lung cancer doesn't get you, a heart attack will.

Then again, if you're living in Cairo, there are probably fewer carcinogens in the shisha smoke than in the air you're breathing, so smoke away...

Slightly ironic: Saudi Arabia's tourism industry could lose billions this year from a decline in hajj and umrah travel caused by... pigs.

"Swine flu is a bigger threat than the economy," said Adel Ali, the chief executive of the Sharjah-based budget airline Air Arabia in an interview on Sunday. "A lot of people are not travelling because of [it]."

The hajj has some interesting economic effects: It often helps to facilitate trade by bringing together Muslims from different parts of the world.

But in the midst of a global pandemic, that becomes a negative: You don't want to bring together millions of people in close quarters for a whole week, especially not when the hajj is within flu season -- as it does this year, falling in mid-November.

More than 50 American soldiers have been diagnosed with swine flu, according to Iraq's health ministry, and dozens of others may be infected.

The concern is that the American troops will pass the disease to Iraqi soldiers while on joint patrols -- and the Iraqis will then spread it among the rest of the population.

From True/Slant blogger Eileen Read comes this tearjerker (regretfully, our second post on Sex and the City in recent days):

"Sex and the City" actress Kristin Davis won't be acting as a spokesman for the British charity Oxfam as long as she is a paid spokesman for Israeli cosmetics maker Ahava, Oxfam said this week.

Ahava has a factory in the Jewish settlement of Mitspe Shalem, located about 45 minutes south-east of Jerusalem in the Judean Desert near the Dead Sea.

Ahava sells the mud it scoops out of the Dead Sea and advertises it as being "Made in Israel." The Israeli Coalition of Women for Peace currently boycotts Ahava and claims the mud comes from Palestine. Poor Davis apparently didn't know.

Mahmoud Abbas was unanimously re-elected as the leader of the Fatah movement -- though the outcome was never really in doubt, since Abbas was the only candidate. In a speech before the Fatah conference in Ramallah, Abbas said no Palestinian leader has the right to give up the goal of Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state.

Abbas also said he reached an "understanding" with Israel, with the backing of the Bush administration, and accused Israel of reneging on that deal.

He said this included all of east Jerusalem, the Jordan Valley and all parts of the Dead Sea located in the West Bank. "But now the Israelis are trying to deny this and create a reality in Jerusalem, claiming that Jerusalem is united under their sovereignty," he said last week.

Abbas also called for the release of some 11,000 prisoners in Israeli jails.

Typhoid fever now joins Egypt's litany of public health problems.

Hundreds of villagers of al-Bradaa in Qalyoubeya governorate have been affected by typhoid recently. Whereas, the number of cases in Sharqeya reached 23.

A new official committee is listening to complaints of patients affected with typhoid and will examine the drinking water network in villages, as well as the main water reservoir.

A big problem for provinces near Cairo, like Qalyoubeya, is rapid population growth. The province is about 50km north of downtown Cairo, and its economy has traditionally been dominated by agriculture. But in recent years it has seen an influx of migrant workers, people who work in Cairo but can't afford more expensive housing in the capital.

So parts of Qalyoubeya are now part of the "Greater Cairo" metro area. The northern end of Line 2 on the Cairo Metro is Shubra El-Khayma, a city in Qalyoubeya.

Many cities and towns on the outskirts of Cairo proper have seen the same rapid growth, and the infrastructure never seems able to keep up.