Ministry to stop testing for swine flu, treat all suspected cases

The Health Ministry is making changes to the way it deals with swine flu, limiting tests for the virus while at the same time broadening the criteria for suspected cases of the disease.

Health Ministry Director General Prof. Avi Yisraeli Wednesday instructed health care providers to test for the virus only in patients hospitalized with serious respiratory distress, or by order of a district physician in the event of a localized outbreak.

At the same time, anyone with a fever of 38 degrees Celsius or more and at least one influenza symptom is to be treated as potentially having the disease.

The symptoms are runny nose, headache, coughing, muscle pain and shortness of breath. Suspected cases are to be treated on an outpatient basis and given Tamiflu if needed.

Previously only individuals returning from abroad, or who were in contact with others diagnosed with the disease, were tested for swine flu.

"Anyone suspected of having the disease, as well as those in high-risk groups such as children and pregnant woman, will be considered as possible swine flu cases and will be treated pharmaceutically but will not undergo laboratory tests and it won't be known definitively whether they have swine flu," the ministry's director of public health services, Dr. Itamar Grotto, said.

"We don't need to know how many definite cases there are in Israel, and according to World Health Organization directives there is no need to test all suspected cases. When we tested people thought to have the disease we saw that in any event most tested positive. It must be remembered that swine flu is usually not serious although we must be prepared for serious cases as well," Grotto said.

The Health Ministry has confirmed 1,054 cases of swine flu in Israel. The Israel Center for Disease Control within the ministry has assigned more than 20 clinics from the Clalit and Maccabi health maintenance organizations to monitor cases of the disease. It has also tapped a number of hospital emergency rooms to collect data on the illness in order to provide an overall picture of the spread of swine flu in Israel. This week there was an increase in the number of children with disease.

Health authorities expect the number of cases to rise when schools reopen in September, prior to the seasonal rise in flu cases in December and January.

Some experts have discussed the possibility that swine flu might mutate into a more serious form of the disease, but others say it is too early to make such predictions.