Tag Archives: Egypt

4-year-old UK boy needs new kidney after E. coli in Egypt

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Four-year-old Bodie Elliot from Canterbury, U.K., (right, photo from Kent Online) was struck down with E.coli on a family holiday will now need a kidney transplant, his parents revealed today.

Kent Online reports that parents Vernon and Emma were left devastated after doctors told them.

The couple all had stomach upsets after eating at a hotel in the popular resort of Sharm el Sheikh in Egypt in September 2008.

When they returned home, Bodie quickly became increasingly ill and was taken to hospital.

Bodie nearly died after suffering kidney failure and to be put on dialysis and have a blood transfusion.

But he continues to need hospital care and is now being treated at Great Ormond Street Hospital.

A consultant there has just told the family Bodie’s kidneys are only functioning at around 50 per cent capacity.

Mr Elliot said the couple remained locked in legal dispute with the hotel over what they claim were poor food hygiene standards that led to themselves and Bodie falling ill after eating a beef lasagne from a buffet.

But in an email to the family, the hotel’s insurers deny any responsibility claiming no other guests reported feeling ill at the time.

It added that the business is regularly inspected for health and hygiene and its procedures found to be "acceptable and appropriate."

Mr Elliott said,

"I will continue to fight for compensation for my son but we also want to make people aware of what a deadly bug this is because we wouldn’t want another family and child to go through what we have."

Egypt kills pigs to stop a virus that moves person-to-person

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Egypt began culling its roughly 300,000 pigs on Wednesday and, Reuters reported,

“The move is not expected to block the H1N1 virus from striking, as the illness is spread by people and not present in Egyptian swine. But acting against pigs, largely viewed as unclean in conservative Muslim Egypt, could help quell a panic.”

The next day, according to the Associated Press, the World Organization for Animal Health said, "there is no evidence of infection in pigs, nor of humans acquiring infection directly from pigs," and the World Health Organization announced, "Rather than calling this swine flu … we’re going to stick with the technical scientific name H1N1 influenza A."

These organizations recognized that Egyptians aren’t getting the whole story.

The World Health Organization has raised the alert on the H1N1 flu virus to phase 5, which assistant director-general Dr. Keiji Fukuda said is reserved for situations in which the likelihood of a pandemic “is very high or inevitable.” The move reflects the need for countries to take the virus seriously, and Egyptian leaders appear to be doing just that. However, costly culls that act against current evidence are sending inaccurate messages to the public about the risks present and the ways in which they can be effectively controlled.

Egyptian pig farmers are outraged. The remaining citizens feel a bit safer now. But they will all feel terribly betrayed when the H1N1 flu infiltrates their borders in the form of an infected human.