CAIRO - Cairo Airport officials Wednesday stepped up preventive efforts to combat E.coli, fearing the annual holiday summer season could provoke outbreaks despite reassurances from the Ministry of health. Some two million foreigners and Egyptian expatriate workers are expected to arrive in Egypt for the summer vacation, which takes place between June and September. The summer vacation and the huge number of arriving passengers are both conducive to the spread of the virus, the officials said. However, the Ministry of Health has played down concerns, saying that only one case of E.coli has been reported in the Red Sea resort city of Hurghada on Tuesday. It said that a 32-year-old German tourist was hospitalized after suspicion that he had contracted the virus before coming to Hurghada. Meanwhile, the German Embassy in Cairo said that it had prepared a special plane to fly the tourist, identified only as G.K, back home upon his own request. The Ministry of Health officials said that they had reinforced E.coli testing measures at airports as thousands of European and American vacationers would be heading home for the summer holidays. The WHO-approved testing measures would be applicable to travellers coming from European Union countries and the United States although all data indicate that the number of new infections from the virulent strain of bacteria is likely to drop. No European Government has been able to pin down the cause of the outbreak that has stricken over 2,400 people in 12 countries. In a related development, Dr. Osam Abdul Azeem, the Ministry of Health Under-Secretary in Hurghada, said that the German tourist had developed a severe complication called haemolytic uraemic syndrome (HUS) affecting the blood, kidneys and nervous system. He told the officials Middle East News Agency (MENA) that analysis of samples from restaurant and kitchen, which prepared food where the German tourist ate has failed to yield conclusive evidence that he had caught the disease in Egypt.
