Rising temperatures scorch Egypt’s rural poor
August brought a stifling heat wave to Egypt, where the short-staffed medical centers of small villages were overrun by patients and officials downplayed the number of deaths.
Ahmed Rizq watched the mercury in his thermometer rise: 118, 127 … 131 degrees Fahrenheit. It rose higher than he had ever seen it go before. And then it stayed there — for more than three weeks. Rizq had lived in Aswan in the very south of Egypt his whole life; he could take a little heat. But August 2015 was a new kind of hot. It was the sort of hot that could kill you.
By Aug. 10, the Ministry of Health had begun emailing flyers to hospitals all around the country, encouraging citizens to stay at home if possible and avoid prolonged exposure to direct sunlight. But those flyers never reached the desert village of Ladid. Even if they had, they wouldn’t have made a difference, said Rizq, a public health researcher and human rights lawyer for the Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights.
“The village is close to a mountain in the desert,” Rizq told Al-Monitor. “There isn’t a water source inside. You’re outside the agricultural area by some kilometers.”
Ladid, like most small Egyptian villages, is served by a modest medical center. In general, these centers are well-equipped but lack the staff to run them, Rizq said, because anyone who can get enough medical experience to get out of his village usually does. The closest hospital is in Edfu, about an hour and a half away by public transportation. By mid-August, Ladid’s residents were shuttling their sick and dying to and from the general hospitals in Edfu, Luxor and Aswan. “There was a very high number and the hospital had far more people than it was equipped to handle,” Rizq said.
