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| Egypt's last leper colony broaches time of integration Leprosy patients reluctant to leave colony despite change in attitude towards sufferersIt was 59 years ago that Ahmed Ali was grabbed from his house by the Egyptian security services and bundled into an unmarked car, but he remembers the day with perfect clarity. "A neighbour contacted the authorities and told them that I had the leprosy disease, and in those days that's all it took," he said. "I was confused and I was terrified. I had no idea where they were taking me."Ali's destination was Abu Zaabal, Egypt's only surviving leprosy colony. Back in the 1950s this was an isolated community set deep in the Egyptian desert and guarded day and night by camel-mounted policemen.Now, following significant medical advances and a sea-change in social attitudes towards leprosy, Abu Zaabal's doors have finally been thrown open again. But, despite their new freedom, its residents are refusing to leave. "This place is paradise," said Ali. "Why would I want to go?"The future of the colony is now at the heart of a debate about how sufferers of one of the most stigmatising diseases can be reintegrated into society. "Colonies were built for an era where the only known treatment for leprosy was complete quarantine," said Dr Salah Abd El-Naby, head of the leprosy programme at Egypt's ministry of health. "That's no longer the case."Despite specialist outpatient clinics having opened up in every governorate in the country, negating the need for the isolation of leprosy patients, official efforts to bring Abu Zaabal's days as a separate community to an end have been met with stiff resistance from the patients themselves.The story of Abu Zaabal begins in 1933, when a leprosy colony was established in what was then a remote wasteland 20 miles outside of Cairo. Originally intended to be a self-sustaining community incorporating 125 acres of farmland, patients brought to Abu Zaabal instead found themselves locked in an open-air prison with little contact with the outside world. Shunned by fearful locals and with few resources to fall back on, the colony soon slipped into disrepair."You can't imagine what it was like back then," recalled Gian Vittoria, an Italian nun who arrived at Abu Zaabal in 1985. "The government hired nuns from abroad to treat patients here because no Egyptian nurses would come near the place. When we arrived we found it completely trashed."Over the past decade, though, a series of dramatic improvements has transformed the largest leprosy colony in the Middle East into a thriving village of 6,000 people.Three-quarters of them are former leprosy patients who rely on the colony hospital for ongoing medication; many have married and had children, while some outsiders have also been attracted to job opportunities inside the compound. "Everything's different now," explained Dr Ahmed Rashad, director of Abu Zaabal's hospital. He grew up in a nearby town and remembers his school friends spreading dark rumours about the colony, which was situated far from roads and across a river. "Leprosy had a fearsome reputation back then and we were all scared of the patients living behind those walls. Now a lot of money has come in from foreign donors and we have a bakery, a kitchen, a shoe workshop and even a broom factory; even those with quite severe deformities are offered employment tending to the gardens and keeping the place clean."Formerly far removed from other settlements, Abu Zaabal has now been enveloped by Cairo's rapidly-expanding urban sprawl; where empty desert once stood, the capital's fringes have crept right up to the colony's doors. The patients' new proximity to wider society has reflected a shift in global attitudes towards leprosy, also known as Hansen's disease – one of the oldest medical conditions on record.In the middle ages sufferers of leprosy in some parts of the world were made to wear bells and use separate currency due to the assumed contagiousness of the disease, and as recently as 1985 it was still considered a significant health issue in 122 countries.Modern research, however, has shown that 95% of people are naturally immune to leprosy and that the disease is not hereditary; in the past 20 years multi-drug therapy has cured 15 million patients, and the days when forced quarantine was considered the only possible treatment have long been left behind.According to El-Naby, that is why the residents of Abu Zaabal are now free to come and go as they please. In recent years, less than 200 patients have chosen to move outside of the colony's walls."I spent my youth here, I built a house here, I married my wife here – this is the place I've constructed my life," insisted Radi Gamal, a 40-year-old who was brought to Abu Zaabal from the northern Egyptian town of Beni Suef while in his teens. His friend, Yasin Ali, who earns 150 Egyptian pounds (£16)a month doing plumbing jobs in the colony, agrees. "This used to be a prison, and yes we're now allowed to leave," he observed while playing dominoes on one of the colony's neatly trimmed lawns."But outside these walls when I see people who are fine looking at my deformed hands, I feel ashamed. Here we're all the same, there's a sense of belonging."As in other parts of the world where individuals living with leprosy are concentrated, self-stigmatisation of patients and misconceptions held by non-sufferers about how the disease is transmitted continue to act as barriers to full integration."People in the surrounding areas are still afraid, there's no point pretending otherwise," said Vittoria. "But today you see many Egyptians arriving with food, clothes and other donations, and the patients themselves have helped build a remarkably successful home. The story of Abu Zaabal is a happy one."EgyptJack Shenkerguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Bomber minutes before 7/7 bus blast The coroner at the inquests into the deaths of 52 people in the 7/7 attacks has been shown video of one of the bombers, just before he set off his explosives on a bus. bbc.co.uk |
Militants Attack Chechen Parliament Insurgents attacked the parliament in the strife-torn Russian republic of Chechnya, killing three and wounding 17. online.wsj.com |
WikiLeaks Iraq war logs: Why Iraq has the right to know the full death toll | Hamit Dardagan and John Sloboda The Iraq war logs show the US withheld details of thousands of civilian deaths. This was wrong, and counterproductive• Datablog: every death mapped and data to downlpad• Full coverage of the Iraq war logsAll information about the deaths caused in any disaster, be it a man-made war or a natural catastrophe, is public information which no state has a right to withhold indefinitely. Even in military circles, the latest thinking accepts this view, for a variety of reasons that include its own best interests. We argued exactly this point in a recent article in the British Army Review, co-authored with a British Army colonel.The Iraq war logs contain information on civilian and other casualties that has been kept hidden for more than six years. Also concealed has been the fact that these logs record the names of thousands of Iraqi civilian victims. Whether or not this data is "stolen" from the US military, as a spokesman has asserted, is beside the point. The pertinent fact is that the data on casualties contained within these logs is information about the public (mainly, the Iraqi public) that was unjustifiably withheld by the US government from the public, for reasons that remain unstated.Since the 2003 invasion, Iraq Body Count (IBC) has systematically recorded not just the mounting number of civilians killed in Iraq, but many of the connected details. These have included the time, place and other circumstances of each death and, whenever possible, the name and demographics such as the age, sex and occupation of the dead. Consequently every record in IBC's public database is open to scrutiny, correction (where necessary) and verification. Most importantly, in the context of the Iraq war logs, this detailed level of recording allows IBC's information to be compared and reconciled with new data as it emerges.Our detailed, incident-level analysis indicates that the Iraq war logs are likely to add some 15,000 previously unreported deaths of civilians and police to public knowledge. This is despite the fact that the logs contain a lower total number of civilian deaths than those in IBC's count for the same period of the conflict. This is because the logs miss many deaths that IBC has recorded.Discovering such previously undocumented deaths would have been impossible if the deaths contained in the logs had been presented as simple totals, as is the norm for official announcements or publications of casualty data. Without sight of the incident-level and victim-level details in the logs there is simply no way to establish how such data truly compares to existing sources.From our systematic evaluation of 760 of the logs (including all of those listing more than 20 victims, together with a stratified sample of the many more logs describing smaller incidents), we have already found 113 hitherto unreported victim names, as well as new demographic data for 298 victims. Most victim names appear to be attached to the smaller incidents where one or two people were killed, and which form by far the largest proportion of logs containing casualty data. Retrieving all of the victim names that may be present in all 390,000 logs will require much more work.But like the other casualty details in the Iraq war logs, these names too belong in the public domain – as a memorial to the dead, and public recognition of the loss suffered by their families. Only a list of named individuals, visible to all including those who knew them in life, can ever provide full verification, without omissions or duplication, of the death toll of this war.It is time for governments to realise that the early, voluntary release of casualty information in the conflicts they are embroiled in is the correct thing to do, both from a moral and a pragmatic standpoint. Whatever is holding them back is surely a minor concern when set against the public's right to know the immediate human consequences of war.Iraq: The war logsIraqMiddle EastForeign policyJohn SlobodaHamit Dardaganguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Irish Austerity: Can the Government Survive the Damage? With Ireland reeling from the announcement of harsh spending cuts and a U-turn on the bailout, a byelection on Thursday could foreshadow the ouster of the government in a national vote early next year feedproxy.google.com |