Until recently, Cairo had a refuse-collection system unlike any you'll find in the United States, but it worked—and might even be commended for its efficiency and environmental responsibility. Cairo's households enjoyed free or inexpensive garbage collection, right from the door, by the zabaleen ("garbage people"), an impoverished community of Egyptian Christians living in an area of Cairo known as "Garbage City." The collectors and their families then sorted the trash, reusing, repairing, and recycling what they could, and feeding the organic waste to their livestock, primarily pigs.
Sanitation workers do not generally enjoy high status anywhere, and the zabaleen are despised not only for their jobs, but also for their poverty, their religion, and their willingness to keep pigs as livestock. However, as even American cities discover during a protracted sanitation strike, we do not do well to devalue other human beings, least of all those responsible for keeping us from suffocating in trash.
In a misguided effort to stave off a swine flu epidemic, Egypt ordered that all the pigs be killed, even though the disease is not, in fact, spread by pigs. By the law of unintended consequences, Cairo's citizens are now more vulnerable to disease than before. The zabaleen no longer collect the trash, and the government's effort to replace them with multinational corporations has largely failed. The poorest of the poor have lost their only livelihood as well as their source of food, and Cairo's streets overflow with filth.
I don't write this to belittle Egypt or the Egyptian government, but as a warning. Our country has a problem: Our healthcare system, once arguably the best in the world, is falling apart. (We can disagree over the causes, or even the definition, of "falling apart," but that's not the point here.) There's no shortage of wrangling over what the intended consequences of a federally-imposed health plan might be, but whatever shakes out of that debate, I fervently hope that we will consider the possible unintended consequences before killing off the pigs.
(Sources used for this post included The New York Times and Wikipedia.)
