More than 5,000 passengers a week are entering Egypt with no medical examination to ensure whether they have swine flu or the plague. This comes after the direction of Assiut International Airport has been forced to stop such examinations as the thermal scanners provided by the Ministries of Aviation and Health to measures passengers' body temperatures have broken down. An official source at the airport says that the scanners have broken down because of the extreme heat at the airport arrival hall, which is located in the desert and has no air conditioning. An official source at the airport has admitted that more than 5,000 passengers, mainly from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), enter the country every day without going through any medical examination. The source explained that the quarantine doctors of Assiut Directorate of Health refuse to go to the airport for several reasons, mainly the lack of air-conditioning, fans and drinking water. The source went on to say there is a dispute with the Egyptian Airports Company. The latter refuses to pay for the drilling and building of the wells set up by the Holding Company for Water and Waste-Water and insists that the cost must be incurred by the Governorate of Assiut. The source said that the major disaster, though, is the fact that Cairo Airport receives every week five flights – three on Egypt Air and two on Kuwaiti Airways – coming from Kuwait and transiting at Assiut. Moreover, passengers from Assiut to Cairo do not go through any medical examination because they have traveled on a domestic flight and they have been checked at Assiut Airport.
He also explained that the airport use to receive a daily flight from Libya carried out by the Cairo Aviation Company as well as a weekly flight of the Buraq airline. Yet, the passengers on those flights did not go through any medical examination to make sure they did not have the plague, which has appeared in a village of the Libyan city of Tobruk.
