Swine Flu: Egyptian Police Clash With Protesters Over Pig Slaughter

Egyptian police fired teargas today in clashes with pig farmers angry the government's attempt to slaughter all the country's pigs to guard against swine flu.

Cairo security chief, General Ismail Shaer, said 14 people had been arrested and 12 people – seven of them police officers – injured in the clashes with the largely Christian garbage collectors who raise pigs on the refuse in the slums of Manishyet Nasr outside the capital.

Police were called in after farmers resisted efforts by government workers to remove their pigs.

Egypt ordered the slaughter of all the country's 300,000 pigs last week even though no cases of swine flu have been reported. The World Health Organization has said the move was unnecessary because the virus is being spread through humans.

The campaign has been met from the start by protests and resistance from the impoverished farmers. The consumption and raising of pigs is largely restricted to the Christian minority, about 10% of the population.

Authorities have now expanded the rationale for the slaughter beyond swine flu to a larger campaign against unsanitary pig farming conditions, particularly in the Cairo slums where the garbage collectors live.

In 2008, President Hosni Mubarak ordered all animal rearing, particularly pigs and chickens, to be moved out of populated areas for hygiene reasons. The order was never implemented, however, and authorities say the current crisis is a perfect opportunity.

Pig raising will be restarted in two years at specially constructed farms in the countryside using newly imported animals, officials from the Ministry of Agriculture told Egyptian media.

"Everything Egypt has decided to do – despite the noise it caused here and there – first and foremost aims at protecting human health, and the health of the Egyptian people which is worth all the efforts and the measures taken," presidential spokesman Suleiman Awwad said today .

He added that the measures had the full support of the leaders of Egypt's Christian community.

Egypt was severely affected by the outbreak of bird flu in 2007 with more than two dozen fatalities in the past two years. Some 25 million birds were slaughtered and the rearing of poultry in households largely ended.