Babies' deaths cast shadow on Egypt's health care

By Alaa Shahine

CAIRO (Reuters) - The video shows a poorly lit hospital nursery filled with premature babies in incubators. Doctors are frantically trying to resuscitate some babies while others wail in the background after a night-time power cut.

"God help us! Five are suffering from (cardiac) arrests?" a voice in the background says angrily. "We can handle one or two at most, but five?"

"This is natural, doctor. It's been an hour and a half," says another male voice, apparently referring to the length of the power cut.

A mobile phone camera caught this scene at Cairo's state-run Al-Matariya Educational Hospital in late May on a night when the electricity was cut for nearly three hours after midnight and back-up generators failed to work.

Doctors at the hospital said the outage led to the deaths of four infants. The health ministry, which has referred the matter to the public prosecutor for investigation, says two babies died but that was before, rather than during, the power cut.

The video, which surfaced on YouTube and several Egyptian blogs in June, has sparked a national uproar over a health-care system suffering from a lack of funds, a long legacy of mismanagement and allegations of corruption.

For decades, the government has provided poor Egyptians with subsidized food and fuel, free education and health care.

But public spending on health care has fallen behind over the last six years, accounting for 1.3 percent of gross domestic product in 2006, compared with 2.4 percent in 2001, data from the United Nations report on human development in Egypt showed.