With the swine flu scare sweeping the world, Egypt took it as an excuse to wipe out the country's entire pig population. Of course, it was really a religious/political move aimed at Egypt's Christians (who can eat pork). I posted recently about the inevitable chaos of putting Italians in charge of your garbage collection, but it seems that the decision to wipe out the pigs is equally to blame. It's not as if they weren't warned:

When the government killed all the pigs in Egypt this spring — in what public health experts said was a misguided attempt to combat swine flu — it was warned the city would be overwhelmed with trash. The pigs used to eat tons of organic waste. Now the pigs are gone and the rotting food piles up on the streets of middle-class neighborhoods like Heliopolis and in the poor streets of communities like Imbaba.
And how do the former pig owners feel about the situation?
“They killed the pigs, let them clean the city,” said Moussa Rateb, a former garbage collector and pig owner who lives in the [Christian] community of the zabaleen. “Everything used to go to the pigs, now there are no pigs, so it goes to the administration.”