France: 47 students test positive for H1N1
Reported July 23, 2009
French authorities on Wednesday quarantined around 47 students, most of them believed to be Spanish, after they tested positive for swine flu, while attending a summer French language course at a school in France.
Henri Welschinger, acting director of the La Salle Saint-Nicolas Catholic school, in Issy-les-Moulineaux, said all the students would be sent home.
“We are closing the centre, that’s it. That is the end of activities for this summer,” he said.
Welschinger said the school would be prepared if swine flu returned when school resumed.
Meanwhile, France’s Education Ministry announced it had already prepared nearly 300 hours of educational programming for radio and television to allow those affected by school closures to follow their lessons, the Le Parisien daily reported.
The European Union meanwhile announced that no timetable had yet been established for when a swine flu vaccine would be available to the public across the continent.
Speaking in Brussels on Wednesday, the European Health Commissioner said that rushing the production of a vaccine could have a negative effect.
“We don’t want to put the vaccine in the market, running the risk of creating more problems than non-vaccination. So, we prefer to wait and have an authorised vaccine, which will be safe for our people,” said Androulla Vassiliou.
Vassiliou added that the 27 member states had yet to come up with a cohesive plan to ensure that high-risk groups in the population were vaccinated before the general population.
In Britain, Prime Minister Gordon Brown on Wednesday sought to reassure the public over the virus and announced a new service to deal with increasing numbers of swine flu cases in Britain.
“From the end of this week, the National Pandemic Flu Service in England will be up and running. It will quickly diagnose people who have swine flu and it will give them the opportunity to get antivirals direct from local centres,” Brown told reporters during his monthly news conference in London.
In Cairo, also on Wednesday, regional leaders were meeting for an emergency session at the headquarters of the Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean (EMRO), a regional branch of the World Health Organisation (WHO).
Arab health ministers agreed on Wednesday to ban certain people, including the elderly and young children, from travelling on the yearly Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, in an effort to contain the spread of swine flu.
Doctor Hussein Gezairy, WHO Regional Director for the Eastern Mediterranean region, said that Riyadh will add requirements to the process of getting a visa to Saudi Arabia, where Mecca is located.
Saudi Health Minister Doctor Abdullah Al-Rabeeah said that everyone “involved with the pilgrimage season, whether labourers or health sector workers or military and security personnel overseeing the process or any other workers, everybody will follow the same requirements and procedures for the pilgrims, including all the necessary vaccinations.”
The Hajj is one of the five pillars of Islam – and all able-bodied Muslims are required to perform it at least once in their lifetime if they can afford it.
It attracts about three million people every year to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.
Hundreds of thousands more Muslims also perform Omra, the voluntary lesser pilgrimage that can be completed at any other time of the year.
Saudi and international health experts have already recommended that children, pregnant women, the elderly and those with chronic diseases stay away from hajj this year.
Meanwhile, the US government called for several thousand volunteers to start rolling up their sleeves for the first swine flu shots, in a race to test whether a new vaccine really will protect against this virus before its expected rebound later in the year.
Eight medical centres around the country are enrolling for a series of studies directed by the National Institutes of Health, and the first shots should go into volunteers’ arms by the second week of August.
The worldwide death toll from swine flu is more than 700, according to the World Health Organisation.
Source : Associated Press