Red alert

Panic strikes the heart of red-meat country. Soha Abdelaty follows the trail of mad cow mania
The signs are unmistakable. At the markets, people are opting to buy fish and poultry, and the press is reporting that heightened demand has increased the prices of both. At restaurants and fast food joints the buzz is to pass on the burgers. The last six months have seen the infiltration of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) -- popularly dubbed mad cow disease -- from the United Kingdom into some far-flung European farms and countries from around the globe have responded with growing panic. With the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in Britain last month, images of tens of thousands of animal carcasses burning through the night have been turning a nation of hard-core carnivores to the more sedate white meat. At this rate, Egyptians might even turn vegetarian -- but perhaps that's going too far.
"The whole meat market has suffered this year," laments Haj Ahmed, a butcher working in the middle class district of Nasr City. "It's not our fault. We sell local meat, but we suffer because the media has blown the whole thing [mad cow] out of proportion. Now people are scared of local beef as well," he said.
The government has gone out of its way to reassure the public, especially ahead of the Eid Al-Adha holiday -- a major meat-eating event -- earlier this month. But despite Ministry of Agriculture assurances that the meat available on the Egyptian market is safe, the public remains sceptical. Mohamed, another Nasr City butcher, groans that people are constantly coming up to meat-sellers and asking whether the beef is safe. "Many opt for veal, because they think it might be safer, so veal sales have gone up at the expense of beef," he said.
In December 2000, the height of the European outbreak, the Ministry of Agriculture banned the import of live cows, meat, meat products, and feed containing meat and bone meal (MBM) from anywhere in Europe. The blanket ban was set to last two month, pending a review of the situation. The ministry then extended the ban for another four months, allegedly sealing Egypt off through April. But the recent discovery of a meat shipment from Ireland that was permitted entry into the country has shaken people's faith in the system.
The Ministry of Trade and Supplies claimed to have inspected the shipment and found it disease-free, but sources within the General Authority for Veterinary Services, an affiliate of the Ministry of Agriculture, have leaked reports that Egypt has neither the equipment nor the expertise to detect mad cow. Though the ministry's regulations may be strict, it is generally believed that it is impossible to implement them effectively.
In an effort to show that they are on top of the crisis, the Ministry of Health came out last month with a new plan for screening imported foods. But several of the strategies put forward are less than reassuring, as they seem painfully obvious: training for the supervision of food importation, improved storage facilities at entry ports and an upgrade of the Health Ministry's laboratory facilities. Even these minimal precautions have no set time schedule for implementation and ministry officials have failed to elaborate on how they will guard the public against a disease like mad cow.
Fathi El-Naweewy, a professor of veterinary medicine at Cairo University specialising in the regulations, laws and procedures of food import, criticised the plan as vague, saying that it fails to add substantively to the regulations already in place. "The plan is meant to reassure people, rather than be constructive," El-Naweewy told Al-Ahram Weekly. The problem, El-Naweewy explained, is that if a country doesn't know what it is looking for, it is naturally impossible to avoid it entering the country.
"The regulations are sufficient, so long as we know that country x has a certain disease, in which case we can impose a ban on its products," he said. But the only way anyone can know what countries are suffering from what diseases is if the country in question reports it to the relevant United Nations bodies -- the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) or the World Health Organisation (WHO). "But of course not all countries are eager to do so," El-Naweewy added.
One need only look as far as the existing screening system, with its myriad ministries and authorities jockeying for the final word, to grow worried. No less than five ministries -- the ministries of health, agriculture, supplies, industry and economy and external trade -- along with various experts in the field, provide recommendations to the all-encompassing General Authority for Standardisation and Quality. The authority combines this information with the advice of the Codex Alimentarius, an organ of the FAO, to write up regulations for food importation, which are compiled in a guidebook. Overseeing the implementation of these regulations are two further committees: the Committee of General Inspection and the Committee of Laboratory Inspection, both of which comprise members from all the ministries involved.
The last regulation guidebook was issued in 1996; the regulations for meat products in particular were last updated in 1992. These include a ban on importing meat from all areas where disease has broken out -- believed to sufficiently cover the whole of the mad cow crisis. But a food and nutrition expert and ex-senior official with the FAO told the Weekly that the issue is disastrously complicated by the involvement of so many governmental organs, whose findings are often conflicting. The process is obviously inefficient and costly, and the inevitable conclusion is that the country is susceptible to bringing in foods that do not meet international standards.
Even a top-notch and air-tight system would not free Egypt of complications. A recent FAO report states that despite all the precautions taken by governments to either ban or regulate the importation of beef from the European bloc, mad cow disease cannot be ruled out. "All countries that imported cows, meat and fodder ... from Western Europe and especially from the United Kingdom in the 1980s or thereafter, could also be liable to the outbreak of such a disease," the report stated. Egypt is one such country.
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