In the race to the dumbest overreaction to the swine flu, Egypt jumps out to an early lead.
Or if not the dumbest, then perhaps the most offensive.
As just about anyone who's watched four minutes of TV coverage or picked up a newspaper has been informed, you can't get swine flu from eating pork. Nor is there any reason whatsoever why Egyptian pigs would be even fractionally more likely to be carrying the virus today than they were a week or a month or a year ago. The risk of the virus spreading across the globe comes solely from human-to-human contact.
So why is Egypt culling all of the more than 300,000 pigs in the country? Probably because it can.
When 90% of your population doesn't eat pork, and there's a virus named after pigs that's causing worldwide panic, the political benefits of screwing over the 10 per cent who do eat it probably outweigh the negatives.
If that just meant that Egypt's Christian population had to eat more chicken for a while, it would be hard to get worked up. But those Egyptians who raise pork - of whom there must be a significant number, if there are more than 300,000 pigs in the country - just had their livelihoods yanked out from under them.
If they weren't part of a minority group, you have to figure they'd at least get compensation. Instead, Egypt's health minister has informed them that no compensation is needed, because they can still sell the meat from the pigs being killed off.
That would be a great plan, except that it's highly unlikely that the roughly 8 million pork eaters in the country would be up for consuming 300,000 pigs all at once at the best of times - let alone when the government has basically just finished linking pork to a potentially deadly virus, which has to at least subconsciously dull one's appetite a bit.
On the list of the world's great injustices, this little saga isn't at or even near the top. But it does demonstrate that - outside of Mexico, obviously - overreaction to the swine flu has so far done more damage than the virus itself.
