Albania Gripped By Swine Flu

TIRANA, July 20 – Albania on Monday confirmed its first case of swine flu in a student who has already recovered from the disease.
Public Health Institute head Alban Ylli and also the Health Ministry said the student from the southern Albanian district of Gjirokastra was the only person out of 100 suspected swine flu patients to test positive for the virus.
Three Philippine sailors also tested positive but their ship had already left Albanian waters with the three sick sailors on board.
Health authorities did not say how the student was believed to have been infected. He was a student about 20 years old at the Eqerem Cabej University in Gjirokastra who had an A flu but who recovered easily.
Albanian health authorities are warning of an increased risk during the summer as more people travel.
Hundreds of thousands of Albanian immigrants and other tourists mainly from Kosovo and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) come to the country during summer.
Many of them come from neighboring Greece and (FYROM) which have already confirmed they are in a flu pandemic.
Meanwhile health authorities call on the people not to be panicked but to take better care of their health. They appealed for all the people who had signs of the flu to stay home, not go to work, and avoid crowds of people.
Authorities said they had about 5,000 tamiflu doses and had ordered 10,000 more. Health minister Anila Godo said that they would likely get 10,000 more to be calm and safe.
Authorities did not urge people not to follow their vacation plans saying that the flu cases were easy ones.
This week the World Health Organization said there had been more than 700 deaths from swine flu since the start of the outbreak.
The figure was an increase of some 300 since the start of the month.
The global body said it doesn’t know how many cases there were worldwide because it stopped asking countries to report infections last week.
WHO spokeswoman Aphaluck Bhatiasevi said the Geneva-based agency was examining various measures countries can take to slow the spread of the disease.
School closures could be among the recommendations but that it was up to each country to consider appropriate steps for their situations.
School closures would allow more time for a vaccine to be produced and administered widely. Estimates for when this might be the case vary from September to the end of the year.