The Worst of All

From the dismal villages of Egypt last week came statistics that tell more about what is ailing the Land of the Nile than a 9-ft. shelf of political essays.

After 4 1/2 years of studying five delta villages typical of those in which the majority of Egypt's 20 million live, the Rockefeller Foundation came to a sad conclusion: the Egyptian village is perhaps the most insanitary living place in the civilized world.

Worse than Asia. For measuring purposes, the foundation used a scale under which a community with proper sanitary facilities and good health conditions gets a hypothetical 106.5 points. The Egyptian villages scored only 23.8 points, far worse even than populous, poverty-plagued villages in India, China and the West Indies (average: 53-25 points).

Some of the modern plagues of Eygpt: P:Egypt: Amoebic dysentery, which afflicts every villager; bilharzia, an energy-sapping parasitic disease which infects 92%; intestinal worms, 64%; syphilis, 6.5%. P:Typhoid fever, which seizes 2% each year; 6% of the population are typhoid carriers.

P: Acute eye infections that lead to blindness, 6%; trachoma, which can destroy sight, 89%; already blind in one eye, 6.4%; totally blind, i%.

Many of the ills, the foundation had decided, could be blamed on the common house fly. With a budget of nearly $300,000, a staff of 220 doctors, nurses and helpers and the best insecticides, foundation experts fought for three years to eradicate the house fly in these five villages. By 1950, the campaign had brought great victories ; the infant death rate in the testing areas had dropped from a high of 275 to 375 Per 1,000 to only 105. But gradually the fly developed immunity to the foundation's DDT, chlordane and gammexdane.

The "fly count" climbed again to the old rate of 90 or 100 flies per square yard. Last week the foundation sadly announced that the fly had won over man, and then withdrew from the battlefield.

Bread & Cheese. But the fly is only part of the trouble. The foundation found that twelve village families out of every 100 live only on unleavened bread, skim milk and cheese. Fifty-six percent manage to get fresh vegetables once a week. At one village, there is a single doctor who had to treat 27,000 new patients plus 1,100 pregnant women and 5,500 children --a clientele that gave him time only to ask for symptoms and guess at a remedy.

About 5% of Egyptian village families live on an income of less than $3 a month, 61% eke along on $3 to $14.50 a month, 30% get up to $29 and only 7% go above that. None of these families raises its own food.

In the light of its other discoveries, the foundation's last batch of statistics was not surprising: life expectancy for the Egyptian villager at birth is 15 to 20 years. Half the children die before five. An Egyptian reduced the foundation's discoveries to one doleful sentence. "In Egypt," said ex-Minister of Social Affairs Ahmed Hussein Pasha, "the elements of decent life do not exist for the mass of the people, and this is the true measure of our social development."

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