CAIRO: Due to the substantial decline in swine flu cases, the Ministry of Health has officially announced that during the second semester of the academic year, no classrooms where the H1N1 virus appears will be shut down. Only precautionary measures giving the student who shows swine flu symptoms one week off, will be applied, said Amr Kandil, deputy Minister of Health for Preventive Medicine.
Two weeks ago, the Ministry of Education announced that during the second semester of the academic year, which started last week, classes with reported swine flu cases will be shut down for only one week instead of two weeks as was the case in the first semester.
The number of cases is now 16,092, according to the latest swine flu report.
These include 5,592 cases among school students and 862 university students.
During the past two weeks, there were only 18 new reported cases of swine flu, four of which were school students, stated a report by the Information and Decision Support Center (IDSC).
Around the country, the rate of swine flu cases reported has been declining and will continue to do so, Abdel Rahman Shahin, spokesman of the Ministry of Health, previously said.
On the other hand, the death toll from the H1N1 virus in Egypt reached 272 with three swine flu related deaths taking place throughout the past week.
Overall, the number of deaths from the virus has notably decreased during the past two months, as it went down from 122 deaths in January to 13 deaths in February to only one death reported so far in March, according to the IDSC report.
More than 98 percent of the number of patients have been treated from the H1N1 virus, and currently, there are 16 patients receiving treatment at hospitals.
Almost 80 percent of swine-flu related deaths were patients of chronic illnesses, mainly heart and respiratory and lung diseases, and pregnant women.
In a related note, 14 bird flu cases have been reported in Egypt starting 2010, four of which have passed away. The majority of the cases were reported in coastal governorates, said the IDSC report.
