CAIRO: The Cabinet's Information and Decision Support Center (IDSC) announced that Egypt will start treating Egyptian patients suffering from H1N1 virus in their homes, while only certain cases will be treated in hospitals. According to an official statement issued by the IDSC on Friday, the center indicated that only cases with certain criteria that will be announced later by the Ministry of Health will be treated at hospitals. The statement further added that the Ministry of Health will launch a new media awareness campaign to inform the public about which cases will be transferred to hospitals and how patients can receive treatment at homes. The statement did not mention the reasons for this decision, which constitutes a change in the way the Egyptian Ministry of Health deals with the H1N1 virus. In a previous interview, Abdel Rahman Shahin, the official spokesman of the Ministry of Health, said that Egypt follows the system of "government's direct supervision on all patients unlike other countries that depend on awareness but allow patients to get treated at home. Shahin praised the method that Egypt had chosen to deal with the H1N1 virus describing it as "efficient and saying that it has had an impact on lowering the number of infected cases in Egypt compared to other countries. Although the number of infected cases of swine flu in Egypt is the highest amongst all other Arab countries, it is not very high relative to Egypt's population of around 80 million. So far, 700 cases have been reported, including one death. Eighty percent of the cases have fully recovered. Oman, however, has reported six deaths and Saudi Arabia 19, while Israel reported 14 deaths. Recently however there has been a remarkable increase in the number of new H1N1 cases in Egypt per day, shifting from an average of five to 15. A recent statement issued by the World Health Organization (WHO) indicated that the total number of deaths from the H1N1 virus has increased to 2,185 worldwide.
