Newspaper Lashes Out at Official Measures Against Swine Flu

A pro-government newspaper said that a large number of Syrians were prone to contract the H1N1 swine flu virus because of officials’ neglect and the lack of proper preventive measures against the spread of the disease.



The Syrian health ministry declared recently that up to the beginning of this month, there had been 56 cases of infection with H1N1 but denied rumours that the virus was spreading in schools.



Ali Hassoun wrote in an October 1 op-ed article in Baladuna that the measures taken on the borders and at Damascus airport to contain the virus were “silly”.



Hassoun, a columnist, said that the authorities’ only measure to spot people carrying the virus was a questionnaire to arriving passengers asking whether they had fever or not.



To show what he called officials’ lack of a sense of responsibility, the columnist told the story of his friends who went to a local centre to test whether they had the H1N1 virus after feeling they might have the symptoms of the disease.



He said that the centre’s employees only agreed to administer the test after they said they had been on a trip to Spain recently. The next day, they were told that they were healthy, he said. But hours later, the centre called them again to tell them that they had contracted the disease and needed to take medicine against it.



When they went to the hospital later that day to take the test again, they discovered that they had never been infected with the virus.