{"id":17606,"date":"2025-03-27T16:42:19","date_gmt":"2025-03-27T14:42:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/?p=17606"},"modified":"2026-10-24T15:06:34","modified_gmt":"2026-10-24T13:06:34","slug":"medical-negligence-sports","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/medical-negligence-sports\/","title":{"rendered":"Fatal Delays: The Gaps in Emergency Medical Care at Egypt\u2019s Sports Grounds"},"content":{"rendered":"

The <\/span>death<\/span><\/a> of the Egyptian karate player Youssef Ahmed (17 years old), after an ordeal that lasted 41 days, which he spent in a coma at a hospital in Alexandria after suffering a powerful blow to the chest while competing in the national championship at the Olympic Centre in Maadi, brought back to mind the painful memory of the passing of <\/span>Ahmed Refaat<\/span><\/a>, a player in the first football team of Modern Sport Club, at the age of 31, after he suffered cardiac arrest when he collapsed during his team’s league match against Al-Ittihad of Alexandria. He was taken to hospital and received treatment, then left it in April, before he passed away on 6 July 2024, in an incident that reminded the Egyptian public of the death of Al Ahly player <\/span>Mohamed Abdel Wahab<\/span><\/a> on 31 August 2006, during Al Ahly training at the Mokhtar El-Tetsh stadium, after he suffered a cardiac arrest that claimed his life.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\nHowever, the deaths of both Youssef Ahmed and Ahmed Refaat come within a series of deaths that Egyptian sports grounds have witnessed in the recent period: Mohamed Yehia Sebaei (17 years old), a <\/span>player<\/span><\/a> at Al-Shams Club for squash, died on 17 January last, after suffering a sudden health crisis while taking part in the Black Ball squash tournament; after being taken to hospital, he passed away inside the intensive care unit. The player <\/span>Adham Bobo<\/span><\/a> (18 years old), a player at Al-Nasr Youth Centre in Alexandria, also collapsed on 24 January last, during a joint training session between his team and the team of Ambrozo Youth Centre, struck by a sudden heart attack that claimed his life, hours before an official match for his team in the fourth division league of Alexandria’s clubs and youth centres.<\/span><\/p>\n

Last December, <\/span>Amr Kalousha <\/span><\/a>(20 years old), a player at Nasser Youth Centre in Sharqia, died after a sudden heart attack he suffered while playing football on the pitch of El-Helmiya Youth Centre, which belongs to Abu Hammad district in Sharqia governorate. Last November, the Health Directorate of Damietta governorate announced that the heart of the player <\/span>Mohamed Shawky<\/span><\/a> (29 years old), a player at Kafr El-Sheikh Club, had stopped while he was on a ventilator in intensive care; cardiopulmonary resuscitation was performed, but he did not respond this time and passed away. The player had collapsed unconscious on the pitch, after swallowing his tongue, during his team’s match against El-Qazazin in the Egyptian Second Division league.<\/span><\/p>\n

In June 2024, <\/span>Shaza Nagm<\/span><\/a> (15 years old), a player in the junior girls’ team at Tanta Sporting Club, suffered sudden cardiac arrest while taking part in training with her team at the Tanta Club swimming pool. She was placed on a ventilator after undergoing cardiac resuscitation, after her heart had stopped 3 times, and the player fell into a coma for about a month before she passed away. On 21 July 2024, the Egyptian Ministry of Sports <\/span>announced<\/span><\/a> the death of El-Kahraba Club rowing player Mohamed Amr Mostafa (17 years old), after his body was found following his drowning in the River Nile during training. Earlier, the Egyptian boxer <\/span>Ramez Hossam <\/span><\/a>(17 years old), a player at El-Sekka El-Hadid Club in Tanta, died in February 2023, after being placed on ventilators at Tanta University Hospital, from the effects of a brain haemorrhage and after falling into a coma, having received several fatal blows at the hands of his opponent at the conclusion of the national youth championship.<\/span><\/p>\n


\nRecommended reading: <\/b>Sports betting in Egypt: between the dream of quick riches and the reality of loss and debt<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n


\nA Shortage of Medical Resources<\/b><\/h1>\n

These tragic deaths of young male and female athletes come at a time when the Ministry of Youth and Sports and the sports federations in Egypt are facing widespread criticism over the shortage of medical resources and equipped ambulances, and the failure to provide cardiopulmonary resuscitation devices and defibrillators at Egyptian sports grounds, in addition to the shortage of medical staff and paramedics trained to deal with life-threatening emergencies, which constitutes a grave shortcoming in safety and prevention procedures.<\/span><\/p>\n

According to the National Media Authority, there is a huge disparity between the safety procedures in the halls and grounds hosting other sports at the major clubs and those at provincial clubs, and between the Premier League for football and the lower leagues. It revealed that the late Akram Hafila, head coach of the Ahly Faraskour Youth Centre team in Damietta governorate, suffered a cardiac arrest and collapsed to the ground after his team scored its second goal during a match against El-Rawda in the fourth division of the football league, and that he did not receive rapid first aid, nor was there an ambulance to take him to the nearest hospital, because the ground had no ambulance.<\/span><\/p>\n

The authority revealed in a report<\/a> that the health directorates in the various governorates refuse to send ambulances to sports grounds until the approved rent has been paid, which differs from one directorate to another, showing that the fees for renting an ambulance in Cairo are the highest among the governorates: the rent for an ambulance at some matches reaches EGP 3,000, while the same vehicle is rented for youth matches and the lower divisions for EGP 1,500, which indicates that the rental value has not been standardised. In the provincial governorates, the value of renting an ambulance rose from EGP 250 in second division matches to EGP 750, while rental fees reach EGP 500 in the third division and EGP 250 in the fourth division. The report revealed that some clubs fail to rent ambulances because they are not available in sufficient numbers in some governorates, owing to several matches being held on the same day, ambulances being occupied with other important events, or some ambulances being in for maintenance, which has led to hearses being used at football grounds.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On 22 September 2024, the Egyptian Football Association had added a <\/span>clause<\/span><\/a> to the league’s regulations and conditions obliging clubs hosting second division (“Professional League”) matches to have ambulances present within the match ground as a precaution against any medical circumstances. The clause stipulates that the host team must provide the ambulance 20 minutes before kick-off, or produce the vehicle’s booking receipt if it is not present, and these are two conditions for starting any match. If the ambulances or their booking receipt are not present, the match referee is entitled to end the match, with the host team considered defeated, according to the provisions of the competition’s regulations and conditions of which the clubs were notified.<\/span><\/p>\n

On the basis of the decision, a football <\/span>match<\/span><\/a> between the teams of Al Ahly and ENPPI in the Egyptian Women’s League was cancelled on 21 November 2024 because there was no ambulance at the match ground.<\/p>\n

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Recommended reading: <\/b>Overlapping interests: Egyptian sports clubs as an arena for political conflicts<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

Life-Saving Procedures<\/b><\/h1>\n

Dr<\/span> Mohamed Allam<\/b>, a specialist in sports injuries and motor rehabilitation, explains that the excessive physical exertion athletes endure, uncontrolled blood pressure and the physical condition of the male or female player increase their chances of suffering heart attacks or cardiac arrests. If a player suffers a heart attack during a match or training and does not lose consciousness, the paramedic or doctor must try to calm him and relieve him of anxiety and tension, and ask him whether he has a stomach ulcer, takes blood-thinning medication or has taken aspirin; if he answers no, he should be given two or three tablets of children’s aspirin, “Aspocid”, as first aid to control the severity of the heart attack.<\/span><\/p>\n

Allam stresses to Zawia3 that an ambulance and a defibrillator must be available close to sports grounds to deal with life-threatening injuries to players, such as cardiac arrest and heart attacks, emphasising the need for the paramedic or doctor at the ground to be ready to perform cardiac resuscitation and artificial respiration on the male or female player immediately in the event of cardiac arrest, while taking care not to move the injured person from where they fell to another place before the ambulance arrives, to prevent the condition from deteriorating, and sparing them any extra exertion. <\/span><\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Dr <\/span>Ahmed Ashraf Eissa,<\/b> a consultant in cardiology and sports cardiology, explains that the sudden collapse of young athletes to the ground during matches or training, and their cardiac arrest, may be due to a clot in the heart, as happened with the late Mohamed Shawky, the Kafr El-Sheikh Club player who died of his injury. This is not common among young people and the young in age, but genetic factors, in addition to physical exertion and a large loss of fluids, lead to a clot in the coronary artery or the pulmonary arteries that causes cardiac arrest. Insufficiency of the coronary circulation or the coronary arteries may also cause cardiac arrest, as may cases of electrical disturbance, particularly under high physical exertion.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Eissa warns of the prevalence of cases of myocarditis among athletes after they catch colds, since when their immune system weakens and they do not get sufficient rest, they become susceptible to inflammation of the pericardium and the heart muscle, which leads to failure of heart function and weakness of the heart muscle, in a way that forces the player to stop playing for long periods or causes him a sudden cardiac arrest. He affirms to Zawia3 that the specialisations of sports cardiology and psychological rehabilitation for athletes have become extremely important in sporting circles around the world, explaining that after violent injuries players suffer from anxiety and fear that the injury will recur and need their self-confidence to be strengthened, and when a player suffers a severe injury that forces him to stop playing, he needs psychological rehabilitation to accept the matter.<\/span><\/p>\n


\nRecommended reading: <\/b>The marginalisation of women in sport: a lesson from the Paris Olympics<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

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The Lack of Thorough Examinations<\/b><\/h1>\n

Dr <\/span>Mohamed Hassan Khalil<\/b>, head of the Committee for the Right to Health and a retired cardiologist, believes that there are reasons behind the repeated deaths of young athletes in Egypt, the most important of which is the failure to conduct thorough and comprehensive medical examinations for male and female players, especially those who practise violent sports or competitive sports that require high physical exertion, such as football, basketball and squash. The examinations should include an electrocardiogram, an echocardiogram, a nuclear scan of the heart muscle (if a problem is suspected), clinical assessment and the family’s medical history to detect rare hereditary diseases and the occurrence of unexplained deaths at a young age, since clots and heart attacks are rare among young people, and when they occur there are other diseases behind them, such as heart rhythm disorders, which are a rare condition, and lupus, which affects the arteries and may lead to heart attacks. He explains that the team doctor, or the doctor specialising in sports medicine or the treatment of sports injuries, must seek the help of a consultant cardiologist to assess and deal with these cases.<\/span><\/p>\n

The head of the Committee for the Right to Health explains that there is supposed to be an emergency doctor or trained paramedic at the ground who can diagnose the condition and give first aid to players in cases of life-threatening injury, such as performing cardiac massage or artificial respiration, as a minimum until the ambulance arrives and the injured person is transferred to intensive care at hospital, in the event that a defibrillator and an electrocardiograph are not available near the ground. He points out that the health system is supposed to consist of a first line of defence working with simple resources, after which cases move through the second and third lines of defence, in addition to the availability of means of transport, ambulances and communication; however, the health system in Egypt lacks order, and general practitioners and any newly graduated doctor lack the ability to diagnose and classify critical cases, because of the overloaded curricula in medical schools.<\/span><\/p>\n


\nRecommended reading: <\/b>Ramadan tournaments: from street art and football to the art of politicisation<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

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<\/b><\/p>\n

Parliamentary Moves<\/b><\/h1>\n

In mid-March this year, MP Mahmoud Essam, member of the House of Representatives, submitted a <\/span>briefing<\/span><\/a> request addressed to Dr Khaled Abdel Ghaffar, Deputy Prime Minister for Human Development, and the Minister of Youth and Sports, regarding negligence and the absence of medical equipment at sporting events, accusing the Ministries of Health and of Youth and Sports of failing to secure sporting events. He cited the cases of the karate player Youssef Ahmed Mostafa (17 years old), who at the time had been lying in a coma for more than a month after receiving a powerful blow to the chest during the national karate championship, and warned against a repeat of the case of the late player Ahmed Refaat, who breathed his last in 2024 after a sudden heart attack that rescuers dealt with slowly; this was before the player died of his injury, so that the two became symbols of the system’s failure to protect athletes.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the briefing request, the MP revealed the absence of the most basic safety standards during a karate championship organised by the Egyptian federation for the sport under the supervision of the Ministry of Youth, where the player Youssef was left, after his injury, for half an hour without urgent medical intervention, in an arena devoid of specialist doctors and equipped ambulances, which led to cardiac arrest and damage to brain cells before he was taken to hospital. He levelled direct accusations at officials of laxity in applying international safety requirements, pointing out that combat sports such as karate require the presence of integrated medical units capable of dealing with serious injuries, which are absent from most local championships. He affirmed that several reports have recorded repeated incidents of death or permanent disability among athletes because of delayed ambulances, demanding an urgent investigation in light of Egypt’s regular organisation of world sporting events, and the necessity of obliging all sporting events, especially dangerous ones, to provide emergency doctors, ambulances equipped with resuscitation devices and a rapid evacuation plan with nearby hospitals, together with legislating deterrent penalties for those responsible for health disasters, establishing a national emergency fund to support critical cases, and rehabilitating the medical infrastructure in clubs.<\/span><\/p>\n

For his part, MP Dr <\/span>Ashraf Hatem<\/b>, head of Parliament’s Health Committee, believes that the tragedy of young athletes’ deaths has come to recur noticeably, and that its cause is often a heart rhythm disturbance in the male or female player, or the occurrence of sudden cardiac arrest. He attributes this to the possibility that players take drugs that help to stimulate and build muscle, which can cause an increase in heart rate and lead to enlargement of the heart, which may cause death, and this is the responsibility of coaches, team doctors and those running sports clubs; in addition, there are hereditary diseases that must be detected early through the medical examinations carried out by doctors specialising in sports medicine.<\/span><\/p>\n

The head of the Health Committee explains to Zawia3 that both the Ministry of Youth and Sports and the Ministry of Health had proposed, at a meeting attended by the parliamentary committee, that heart-stimulation devices be provided at Egyptian sports grounds, but the matter requires huge equipment and financial resources. He considers that responsibility for the absence of an equipped ambulance or a specialist doctor at the ground lies with the sports federation of the game concerned and the team hosting the match.<\/span><\/p>\n

It is worth noting that the budget<\/a> of the youth and sports directorates in the governorates for the 2024\/2025 fiscal year amounted to EGP 4,323,425,000, an expected increase of about (EGP 967,782,000) over the expenditure appropriations of the previous fiscal year. The value <\/a>of economic returns from sports sector projects recorded about EGP 1.97 billion in 2023, compared with EGP 843.91 million in 2018, an increase of 132.88%, while the contribution of the sports sector to Egypt’s gross domestic product reached<\/a> about 0.67% in 2022\/2023, and the target is for the sports sector’s contribution to reach 3% of gross domestic product in 2030.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At a time when the <\/span>value <\/span><\/a>of economic returns from sports sector projects and <\/span>the contribution of the sports sector to gross domestic product in Egypt are increasing, the shortcomings and disparities in safety and prevention procedures and <\/span>the shortage of medical resources, trained paramedics and equipped ambulances at Egyptian sports grounds continue to batter Egyptian sport and threaten a continued haemorrhage of the lives of young male and female athletes.<\/span><\/p>\n

Editorial correction: The first version of the report stated that Modern Sport player Ahmed Refaat died at the age of 30, that he remained connected to ventilators until his death, and, elsewhere, that the incident dated back to 2022, whereas he in fact collapsed during his team’s match against Al-Ittihad of Alexandria on 11 March 2024, left hospital on 11 April 2024, and then died on 6 July 2024 at the age of 31, according to what Egyptian media published at the time of his death.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Although the economic returns of sport have multiplied, Egypt’s sports grounds still lack the most basic safety conditions, as the haemorrhage of athletes’ lives continues without real accountability.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":12178,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[413],"tags":[],"kateb":[1550],"class_list":["post-17606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-society-en","kateb-aya-yasser"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/\u0627\u0644\u0645\u0644\u0627\u0639\u0628.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17606","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17606"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17606\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24119,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17606\/revisions\/24119"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17606"},{"taxonomy":"kateb","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/kateb?post=17606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}