The Health Ministry has reported Saudi Arabia's first death from the swine flu virus. The victim was a 30-year-old man who died in a private hospital in Dammam. He was admitted to the hospital last Wednesday suffering from high fever, cough, pain in the throat, breathing difficulties, obesity and severe pneumonia. The patient was given antibiotics and the anti-flu drug Tamiflu, but he died Saturday. The ministry statement did not identify the man or the hospital he was admitted to. There have been more than 300 cases of the disease reported in Saudi Arabia, the most in the Arab world. It was the second reported swine flu death in the region. On July 19, a 25-year-old woman returning from Umrah pilgrimage to Makkah died in hospital in Egypt, although it was not clear where she contracted the swine flu. Arab health ministers at an emergency meeting in Cairo last week banned children, the elderly and those with chronic illnesses from attending this year's Haj pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia fearing it would aid the spread of the disease. Health officials say the immediate worry is the ongoing Umrah season, which peaks during the month of Ramadan in August-September, when more than a million people could arrive in Makkah and Madina. That will be followed by the Haj, a two-week period beginning late November when some two million people are expected to visit the holy cities, most of them arriving through the international airport in Jeddah. “There is crowding of millions of people within a very small area,” raising the risk of the spread of the disease, said Dr Martin Opoka, an epidemiologist at the World Health Organization (WHO) regional office in Cairo. Opoka said that, Saudi Arabia and Egypt aside, the spread of A(H1N1) was not very advanced in the Middle East as a whole, compared to Europe and the Americas. “We are still in the early phase of the disease in the region,” he said. As of July 25, a total of 1,028 cases had been reported in the WHO Eastern Mediterranean region, which spans 22 countries from Afghanistan to Morocco. Saudi health ministry spokesman Khaled Marghlani said Saturday that Riyadh was likely to adopt the Cairo meeting's recommendations and that it would press for pilgrims to be vaccinated against A(H1N1) if a vaccine is proven and available ahead of the Haj. He said the age restrictions would not affect the country quotas set for the number of people going on the Haj. “This will not touch on the quotas, the percentage of pilgrims” allocated to each country, he said. u The worldwide death toll from swine flu has doubled in the past month to over 700, according to WHO. The death rate is still low compared with the mortality rate of normal flu, the Saudi Health Ministry said, assuring transparency in providing information on swine flu in the Kingdom.
