Prominent psychiatrist Ahmed Okasha criticized the government on Saturday for its handling of both the "bird flu" and "swine flu" health crises and accusing it of causing "unnecessary panic" among the public.
"Egypt's health minister comes out everyday to talk about the swine flu," Okasha said at a symposium in Cairo organized by the Egyptian chapter of the Lions Club. "I bet his British counterpart doesn't do this much talking."
"Then he says that flu tests can only be performed at government labs in Cairo," he added. "What about those people living in the provinces?"
"Egyptians deserve better than this," the psychiatrist declared. "I believe that ten years will be more than enough to put Egypt among the advanced nations of the world," he added, pointing out that Egyptians generally excelled when living abroad.
At the symposium, Okasha also called for stepped-up efforts to eliminate poverty, unemployment and early marriage -- problems, he said, which threaten to create a number of psychological problems within Egyptian society.
"How can we advance if we only allocate two percent of the state budget to health and another two percent to education?" Okasha asked.
He went on to point out that the suicide rate in Europe ranged between 7 and 11 cases per 100,000 people, while it was only six in Egypt.
"But we don't have reliable statistics," Okasha noted. "Some 30 percent of people around the world suffer from psychological problems, while here we refuse to admit it to ourselves."
