Radio Svaboda source: People who died had swine flu confirmed

Health Care ministry denies commenting on the outbreak of pneumonia n Belarus, but hospital doctors started to reveal what is going on in reality.

A source in one of the hospitals of Minsk who asked not to reveal her name told to Radio Svaboda:

“150 persons with pneumonia arrived to our hospital on the weekend. Our department and two pulmonology departments are filled to capacity. It is a flu complication. We were told that swine flu was confirmed in the death cases. About 9 persons died. 3 or 4 persons have died in our department, and others in the 5th hospital. All the doctors have been made to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Everybody signed,” the doctor said.

Radio Svaboda tried to check this information in a reception ward of this hospital. To the question whether it is true that 150 persons with pneumonia were admitted to the hospital on the weekend, a worker said: “Yes, that’s true, many people arrived. But my position does not allow me to answer such questions”. She promised to help contact chief doctor, but he was not available on the phone that day.

A spokesperson of the Health Care Ministry Raisa Chuduk told to Radio Svaboda: “You can send a written request to us, I do not have such information still. I think that we will prepare a press-release and place it on the website”.

A doctor who works in the hospital told about other problems health workers face:

“We are not supplied with masks. We do not have enough medicines. We have cases of pneumonia with complications, so we use Belarusian antibiotics: Ceptriaxon, Ceptrofosfat. And foreign medicines are very expensive, we do not have them. The patients are given large doses of antibiotics two times a day,” the doctor said.

As charter97.org website informed earlier, recently reports about swine flu death cases in Minsk hospitals emerged in the Belarusian Internet. Health Care Ministry officials disprove these reports. Valyantsina Kachan, chief sanitary doctor of Belarus, stated that 59 persons are ill with swine flu, but there is no epidemic.

“59 cases of swine flu which are confirmed by laboratory analysis are recorded, but there are no death cases,” Kachan said.

Meanwhile, an acting director of the Republican Scientific and Practical Centre of Epidemiology and Microbiology Alyaksandr Pyatkevich informed that Russia hasn’t supplied to Belarus the A(H1N1) vaccine.

There are no even masks in pharmacies in Minsk, and shortage of inexpensive Belarusian anti-virus drugs like Arpidol is observed.

Schools of Minsk and many other cities of Belarus are closed for quarantine. According to the official version, it is connected with the high level of acute respiratory viral infection rate.