Doctors in Egypt have gone on strike to protest against low wages and badly equipped, unclean hospital facilities.

They say they will handle only emergency and special cases until their demands - an increase in their $45 monthly wage and the tripling of government spending on health services - are met.

The Cairo government, however, says the doctors have gone too far.

The doctors say the conditions in health facilities are so bad that some patients are forced to sleep on the floors of overcrowded hospitals while relatives must procure blood and pain killers from outside sources in order to make up for the low stocks of the hospitals themselves.

Al Jazeera's Sherine Tadros reports from Cairo.