Drinking milk is good for you, but is it always safe? Ahmed Abu Ghazala investigates government plans to make sure the answer is always yes At recent public gathering attended by some 150 individuals at the Road Al-Farag Youth Centre in Cairo, Salah Mohamed, an expert from the Food Inspection Administration at the Ministry of Health (MH), held up a small plastic bag full of milk and said, "you don't know whether this is milk or not. This is a bag full of white liquid, but what it is you don't know." In fact, what Mohamed was holding up was milk, but it was not necessarily safe milk. According to official MH statistics, Egypt produces more than four billion litres of milk and dairy products daily, though up to 80 per cent of this could be unsafe. This huge percentage includes products not produced by authorised firms, or products that may not always be produced, processed, packaged or transported using the appropriate technology or to the proper standards. Unsafe milk can be due to several factors. Cattle may not have had the appropriate veterinary inspections, for example, or milk or milk products may have become tainted either during milking, or during transportation or distribution. Temperature controls may not have been strictly adhered to, causing the potential proliferation of bacteria, or unsafe packaging may have been used, including plastic bags. There have even been reports of milk products being adulterated with harmful chemicals, potentially compromising people's health. As a result, the MH has launched a campaign to deal with such issues and to raise awareness among the general public of them. Mohamed said that the campaign was launched after the discovery of cases of "Malta fever", or brucellosis, caused by unsafe milk or dairy products, some of which may have contained brucella bacteria. "After examining over 10,000 samples of milk and dairy products, we found that up to 33 per cent of kareesh cheese [unsalted white cheese] could be infected by brucella, as could up to 66 per cent of milk," Mohamed said. Moreover, researchers from the Faculty of Agriculture at Alexandria University who examined 100 samples of suspect milk and dairy products found that up to 65 per cent of these suspect products were infected with listeria or salmonella bacteria, both of which can potentially cause severe health problems, particularly in susceptible individuals. The ministry's national campaign targeting consumers was developed in cooperation with Egypt's professional body, the Chamber of Food Industries. "We decided that we would not be able to solve these problems by targeting producers and distributors alone," Mohamed said. "It would also be necessary to raise awareness of these issues among consumers." Previous public-health campaigns, notably those associated with eradicating polio and raising people's awareness of the dangers of eating traditional feseekh (salted fish) at Easter, which may not always be properly prepared or stored, have experienced huge success, leading the ministry to target the public also on the issue of milk and milk products. The campaign is run on the ministry's behalf by a consulting company, Zad, and the first phase started in 2009 with a second being launched in June 2010. As part of the campaign, public meetings have been held at centres in Cairo and Alexandria, each attended by several hundred people. Those attending receive information about the nutritional value of milk and dairy products, as well as the potential harm that can result from consuming unsafe products. There are ways of identifying good-quality milk and milk products, the organisers of the meetings explain, as well as of protecting oneself against potentially unsafe products. The meetings deal with questions from the floor, and they are put together in a relaxed, user-friendly style, with music and film clips related to the topic being used. Gifts are even distributed to those answering milk- related questions correctly. According to Rami El-Azzazi, a facilitator at Zad, those attending the public-awareness meetings are recruited by local coordinators. Elham Al-Said, a women's coordinator in Cairo, told Al-Ahram Weekly that her direct relationships with many of the women involved have been the key to encouraging them to attend the meetings. "At our local women's club, we organise recreational trips, exhibitions, sports events and awareness meetings," Al-Said said, adding that the present Zad campaign was among the activities she had been pleased to join. Members of her group have found the meetings valuable not only for the information they convey, but also because of their social and leisure side, making the gaining of information enjoyable and fun. Those attending the meetings also give various reasons for attending. One woman present at the Road Al-Farag meeting, Hanaa El-Ghazali, said that she had received a letter via the youth centre, since she had been identified as a suitable target for the campaign. "But even more importantly, it is our relationship with Elham that is most important to us, and we accept any invitation that comes through her," El-Ghazali said. "She is a credible source for us, and she has invited us to many activities that were very useful in the end." Some people go to gain new information, El-Ghazali said, while others were attracted by the prospect of free gifts. But "as long as the people hear the information given, and can then pass it on to others, it doesn't really matter much what their original motivation in attending was." Yet, while many of those attending the campaign meetings do change their ways of buying and consuming milk and milk products as a result, others resist the meetings' message, especially in low-income areas. "At gatherings at the Al-Safa Youth Centre in Giza and Al-Sayeda Zeinab in Cairo, attendees were quite resistant to the message that was being sent to them, and some of them objected to what they were being told," El-Ghazali said. According to Salah Hanafi, co-director of Zad, the company has registered such problems, and it even planned for them by making the first phase of the campaign a pilot phase. Meetings were conducted, and then their impacts were measured by asking those attending to fill out questionnaires both before and after the information sessions. As a result of lessons learned during this first pilot phase, carried out only in parts of Cairo and Alexandria, the full second phase was able to incorporate new techniques and to cover much wider areas, including the Giza, Qalioubiya, Helwan and October governorates. "We are aiming at nothing less than changing some of the learned behaviour of Egyptian citizens, as well as a food culture that may have been in place for many years," Hanafi notes. "This can't simply be done overnight, and nor can it be done just by changing prices or simply telling people the information that they need. You have to convince people of the truth of your message and then to reinforce it in different ways." The Zad campaign is multidimensional, Hanafi said, in order to reach out to the audience in different ways, and it was being supported by MH efforts to deal with supply side issues in the milk and dairy industries. According to Hatem Saleh, chairman of the dairy division at the Chamber of Food Industries, the campaign has already had a substantial effect, notably in terms of people's willingness to buy quality dairy products. "The dairy market was growing by nine per cent before the campaign, but this has now reached 23 per cent." Saleh told the Weekly in a telephone interview. His division now wants to increase its 16-20 per cent share of the milk and dairy market to 30 per cent over the next three years and then to 80 per cent by 2020, a plan that had been approved by the MH and by Minister of Trade and Industry Rachid Mohamed Rachid. As part of this plan, there will be increased efforts at raising consumer awareness, increased production facilities, including new farms and factories, an improved dairy marketing sector, and efforts to generalise standards by bringing all producers within the scope of the authorised market system. All of this should lead to even better, safer milk.
