Three devastating epidemics swept Egypt in the 1940’s killing more people than all the wars Egypt has fought in the twentieth century. Egypt’s Other Wars vividly reconstructs the nation’s struggle against malaria, relapsing fever, and cholera and explores the unique combination of forces that put public health at the top of the national political agenda. Egypt in the 1940’s as in the throes of a nationalist upheaval. Nationalists of all political ideologies attributed the sever epidemics that the country was experiencing to Egypt’s status as an underdeveloped and colonized nation. The epidemics were therefore viewed for the first time as not only a public health crisis but also a political problem that called for a political solution.

This briefing reviews the experiences of minorities and indigenous peoples in Egypt during the Covid-19 pandemic, including their living conditions and access to public health services. In particular, it focuses on the experiences of Nubians, Bedouins and Amazigh in the border regions of Aswan, Sinai and Matrouh. While the dispatch of mobile health clinics to the most neglected areas can provide some relief, there is still an urgent need to address the root causes of the health care crisis. New policies addressing both education and health in those areas can help to resolve the issues most effectively. For minority and indigenous communities resident there, who already contend with high levels of poverty and marginalization, the need is especially acute. In all three regions, despite a general surge in spending on health care across the country, many shortcomings remain. The briefing closes with a set of recommendations to address these challenges, focused on targeted prioritization measures in border regions, greater attention to training and capacity building of local personnel, as well as sustainable delivery, with more budget dedicated to staff development and service improvements.

Lives at Risk describes the introduction of Western medicine into Egypt. The two major innovations undertaken by Muhammad Ali in the mid-nineteenth century were a Western-style school of medicine and an international Quarantine Board. The ways in which these institutions succeeded and failed will greatly interest historians of medicine and of modern Egypt. And because the author relates her narrative to twentieth-century health issues in developing countries, Lives at Risk will also interest medical and social anthropologists. The presence of the quarantine establishment and the medical school in Egypt resulted in a rudimentary public health service. Paramedical personnel were trained to provide primary health care for the peasant population. A vaccination program effectively freed the nation from smallpox. But the disease-oriented, individual-care practice of medicine derived from the urban hospital model of industrializing Europe was totally incompatible with the health care requirements of a largely rural, agrarian population. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1990.

This volume reviews the public health concerns and challenges specific to the complex Arab world from a multidisciplinary perspective.