One day this past November, two-year-old Hossam Arafa was playing near in his home in the al-Dadasiyat mountain village in Luxor, when he was bitten by a scorpion. His father immediately took the toddler to the village health center but was told that an anti-scorpion venom serum was unavailable.
One day this past November, two-year-old Hossam Arafa was playing near in his home in the al-Dadasiyat mountain village in Luxor, when he was bitten by a scorpion. His father immediately took the toddler to the village health center but was told that an anti-scorpion venom serum was unavailable.
The desperate father then took Hossam to International Luxor Hospital only to be told again that there was no serum to treat the boy. At that hospital, doctors told the father his son had already started to suffer from partial, temporarily paralysis due to the delay in receiving serum.
“I was waiting for Hossam to grow up and help me with the expenses of his six sisters,” said Arafa, Hossam’s father. “But my dreams vanished when I knew that my only son became paralyzed and would be bedridden.”
Not enough serum for bite incidents
The average number of scorpion bites in Luxor reaches more than 1500, most of them in the center of the Esna, and Arment villages, according to a source at the health affairs directorate speaking under conditions of anonymity. He said that Luxor province alone needs 3,000 doses of the serum per month and that some of the critical cases can require up to 5,000 ampules, depending on the severity of the poisoning.
Yet this mountainous province, with regions teeming with poisonous scorpions and snakes, only receives only half of what it needs: 1000 to 1200 anti-scorpion venom serum ampules per month, distributed among five hospitals and 105 health units in the province, according to the Secretary General Nahed Muhammad Ahmad of the health ministry in Luxor. The anonymous source said this quantity is used up within less than 15 days.
The family of Zainab Ibrahim, an elderly woman in Luxor who recently died because she received no serum after a scorpion bite, spent seven hours going to different health centers in search of serum: Arment Central Hospital, the health unit in al-Zuraiqat Qabli village, the health unit in Arment al-Wabourat, as well as in three other health units, according Muhammad Hassan, a relative.
The family finally decided to go to International Luxor Hospital, 22 kilometres away from Arment Central Hospital. Half way there, Ibrahim died in the car.
Secretary General Ahmad acknowledged the shortage of serum in hospitals and health units, saying the crisis had increased in the past two years with more people moving to villages adjacent to mountainous areas, especially in Esna and Arment. She explained that when Luxor was transformed from a city to a province in 2009, and when many new cities and villages were annexed to it, the quantities of serum it needed doubled while its alloted shares did not.
Frustrated doctors
Ahmad Hamza, the head of the doctor’s union in Luxor province, criticized the health ministry’s policy of distributing the anti-scorpion venom serum. “The ministry ignores the needs of Upper Egypt and remote areas where there are lots of poisonous reptiles. It deals with them in the same way it deals with other provinces in the country,” he said.
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