CAIRO: Egyptian Health Minister Hatem Al-Gabaly warned in a newspaper interview on Wednesday of the dangers posed by swine flu to millions of Muslim pilgrims travelling to Saudi Arabia.
The minister said the government could not bar Egyptian pilgrims from travelling because the decision had to be made by Muslim clerics, but that the authorities could quarantine returning pilgrims.
Al-Gabaly told the independent daily Al-Masry Al-Youm that “there is a large possibility the A(H1N1) virus, which has killed 80 people and infected roughly 10,000 in 39 countries, may reach Egypt with returning pilgrims.
Egypt, which is culling the country’s 250,000 pigs, has not recorded any cases of infection so far.
Islam requires every able-bodied Muslim of sound mind, and with the financial means, to perform the hajj, an annual pilgrimage to Mecca last held in December, at least once.
The Saudi government says more than two million Muslims make the pilgrimage every year.
Umra, a lesser pilgrimage that is voluntary, can be performed year round.
Al-Gabaly said he could not bar Egypt’s estimated 600,000 pilgrims from travelling as such a decision was up to clerics, but that he could “open quarantines and say: no one will return from Saudi Arabia to his home.
The senior Muslim cleric in the Gulf emirate of Dubai already published a fatwa, or religious decree, on May 11 calling on the faithful to delay any pilgrimages to Mecca for the time being.
The emirate’s mufti, Sheikh Abdel Aziz Haddad, also urged worshippers not to pray too close together in Dubai’s mosques or, better still, to pray outside them.
Meanwhile, flu experts around the world have echoed similar worries about the Hajj season but have also suggested solutions.
In the grimmest scenarios, the pathogen would not only find easy pickings among the elderly, the weak and sick in Mecca – it would also hitch a plane ride among pilgrims returning home and thus spread farther.
Just imagine, you have a virus that starts to spread over the world, then you bring people together from all over the world, put them all together for a couple of weeks, then you take them out again, said Albert Osterhaus, a professor at the Erasmus Medical Center at the University of Rotterdam in the Netherlands.
If there s a mechanism by which you want to spread a virus, this is it.
This year s pilgrimage takes place Nov. 25-28.
In interviews with AFP at the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ECCMID), Osterhaus and other specialists cautioned against alarmism, but urged Hajj organizers to start formulating response plans.
The Hajj will take place, it s not like one of those things which is like a Pink Floyd concert, and you say, we don t need the concert . This event will go through, that s for sure, said Andreas Voess, professor of Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Center in the Netherlands.
I believe that the health authorities there, with the help of the WHO and others, would need to look at what do we do, what do we advise people . they have to be prepared and they have to start thinking about what to do now and not when they have got the first pilgrimage victim with influenza.
He added: It is something that has to be looked at, it really does.
Since influenza (A)H1N1 swine flu leapt into the spotlight on April 24, nearly 8,500 people have fallen sick, according to the UN s World Health Organization (WHO).
After originating in Mexico, it has swept into at least 39 countries and the WHO describes a pandemic as imminent.
At present, the viral strain is considered relatively mild.
Even though it is a new genetic mix to which people do not appear to have immunity, it is roughly as contagious and virulent as normal (also called seasonal ) flu, which breaks out every year in slightly different strains and kills between quarter of a million and half a million people annually.
What will happen to the new virus in the coming months is the big unknown, creating a dilemma for watchdogs hoping to protect the Hajj.
We cannot predict what will happen by that time, it might be striking, it might not, it might fade away, Osterhaus said.
One of Europe s top virologists, Osterhaus pointed to three ways the virus could go.
It could be ousted in the battle for Darwinian supremacy by the seasonal virus.
Or it could spread, developing into a pandemic that, by the standards of past killer flues, would be low-level. He drew a parallel with a 1957-58 pandemic that killed between one and four million people.
For pilgrims, the question is whether a pandemic vaccine will be available in time – and in sufficient quantities – to inoculate them.
The third, most frightening, scenario is that H1N1 could pick up genes by reassorting with other flu viruses, making it both more lethal as well as highly contagious. The nightmare benchmark for this is another H1N1 strain that in 1918-19 killed around 50 million people through Spanish flu.
Pentti Huovinen, a professor of clinical microbiology at Finland s National Public Health Institute, said the challenge was to balance the importance of religion and the threat of the disease.
That s a question that we cannot answer very easily, he said. -AFP
