Egypt launches preemptive sandwich at Swine Flu scare

Presently the Tuque Souq global headquarters is guarded by three score and twelve elite fighting boars from the 101st special forces regiment, raised from birth on nothing but habanero salsa and anabolic steroids, trained in forty-seven different forms of martial arts and close-quarter combat, outfitted with fully automatic antiviral laser tusks, and who meditate in alternating twelve-hour shifts to endlessly looped Kurosawa films overlaid with high-volume Rage Against the Machine tracks.

We thought we were safe from the Swine Flu.

But Egypt is going one or two thousand steps further: killing the country's entire population of swine.

There are an estimated 250,000-400,000 pigs in Egypt, raised mainly by the country's Coptic Christian minority. Though there hasn't yet been a case of the latest Swine Flu reported in Egypt, and though the World Health Organization (WHO) begged Egypt not to overreact, the Egyptian government passed emergency legislation to begin slaughtering every last piggy in the land, even calling on the army to help.

WHO is flabbergasted. “We don’t see any evidence that anyone is getting infected from pigs,” said Dr. Keiji Fukuda, WHO’s assistant director general. “This appears to be a virus which is moving from person to person.”

WHO refused to comment on the likelihood that the Egyptian state is using the viral scare to nationalize the swine industry in Egypt, taking the business away from Coptic herders and selling the slaughtered meat back to the public in the form of new state-controlled BLF (Bacon-Lettuce-Falafel) sandwiches.

Even Egypt's health ministry sees through its own government's thinly veiled tactic to rid the country of free-range pork. “We're at stage five [of the pandemic], the matter is now human not animal,” said Egyptian health ministry spokesman Abdelrahman Shahine. “The authorities took advantage of the situation to resolve the question of disorderly pig rearing in Egypt.”

Mr. Shahine then fled the press conference for the nearest all-day breakfast diner, possibly hoping for one last helping of peameal before the ghastly cull is complete.

Alas, this terrible tragedy could've been averted with a little clear thinking, common sense, and seventy-two well-trained defence boars.