Report: Arab Israelis going on hajj need flu vaccines

Thousands of Israeli Arabs should be vaccinated against the swine flu before making the traditional hajj pilgrimage to Mecca in late November, a joint committee comprised of health officials from Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority has advised.

The recommendation, which the Health Ministry is now studying, follows a recent outbreak of swine flu (also known as the H1N1 virus) in Saudi Arabia among Muslim pilgrims who visited Mecca during Ramadan.

The number of people diagnosed with swine flu throughout the region has risen markedly in recent weeks, in part due to the Mecca outbreak. So far, 35 people have died of the disease in Saudi Arabia - a higher death toll than Israel's 32, even though the disease reached Israel much earlier - and more than 4,100 people have been definitively diagnosed with it.

Israeli Arabs currently account for only about 5 percent of Israel's swine flu patients, even though they constitute approximately 20 percent of the population. However, the ministry fears that pilgrims to Mecca could catch the disease there and bring it back with them, thereby sparking a much wider outbreak in Israeli Arab community.

The first doses of the swine flu vaccine arrived in Israel this week; 350,000 doses are slated to arrive by the end of November. The ministry has already decided that the first to be vaccinated will be health care workers and the chronically ill. Only some 4,500 doses would be needed to inoculate the pilgrims, as that is roughly the number Israel sends on the hajj each year, ministry officials said.

At a conference in Morocco two weeks ago for countries belonging to the World Health Organization's Middle East region, Ziad Bin Ahmed Memish of the Saudi Health Ministry urged all countries planning to send pilgrims on the hajj to vaccinate them against swine flu and equip them with a vaccination certificate, which they will be required to present at border control when entering Saudi Arabia. Israel, which belongs to WHO's European region, was not present, but should it decide to vaccinate Israeli Arab pilgrims against the virus, it will equip them with a similar certificate.

Prof. Alex Leventhal, who heads the ministry's international relations department and also represents Israel on the tripartite health panel, noted that the hajj is usually very crowded, which fosters the spread of disease. Moreover, he noted, both Israeli and Palestinian pilgrims pass through Jordan on their way to Mecca, therefore Israel, the PA and Jordan have a mutual interest in vaccination.

Jordan and the PA have 896 and 455 confirmed swine flu cases respectively, and each has reported one death from the disease.

The tripartite panel, called MECIDS (the Middle East Consortium on Infectious Disease Surveillance), was set up in 2003.