# 1459
One of the prime reasons Egypt hasn't managed to get control over their avian flu problem is that many of their citizens simply don't believe their home raised chickens pose a threat.
They distrust their government, and believe talk of bird flu is simply a ruse to get them to give up their chickens. When authorities tried to round up poultry last year, people hid chickens inside their homes, to protect them.
Of course, this isn't just a problem in Egypt.
In many countries people raise chickens and ducks at home, mostly out of necessity. Protein is hard to come by, and home raised fowl is one of the few sources for many families.
This from AFP.
Egypt villagers say poultry innocent in bird flu deaths
DAMIETTA, Egypt (AFP) - In a dark and muddy alley in the Nile Delta town of Damietta, where Egypt's latest fatal bird flu victim Hanem Atwa Ibrahim lived, inhabitants fear the authorities more than the virus.
"It was the will of God that she died. The chickens had nothing to do with it," says Husseini Ahmed Amine, 54, a furniture maker who employs a son of the dead woman, who was aged 50.
Most of the inhabitants of the Ezbet el-Lahm district pay scant attention to the government's campaign against the H5N1 virus which, after a summer respite, killed four people, all women, in the space of a week over New Year.
Health Minister Hatem al-Gabali warned in December against "slackness in the preventive measures taken to fight bird flu especially as winter approaches."
But here, as elsewhere in the country, distrust of the government is widespread.
A national campaign to slaughter possibly infected birds is more often than not seen as just another threat from authorities in which people have no faith.
Ibrahim's death was the 19th fatality in Egypt where there has been a total of 43 cases of bird flu in humans since the disease was first recorded here in February 2006. Women and children have borne the brunt of the virus because of their role in taking care of domestic fowl.
"Listen to me: all these chickens, they don't kill them, they sell them off or eat them," says Hanane Essayyed Farhat, 42, a mother of four selling her poultry a few dozen metres (yards) from the latest victim's home.
"The state and businessmen profit from bird flu. It's all just about trying to get people to buy frozen chickens. That way they'll make money off our back," she adds.
(Cont.)
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