France could help in effort to battle outbreak

FRANCE could help Cyprus to battle the current outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said yesterday.

“Yes, certainly, we can help other European countries, such as Cyprus, overcome such health crises and human tragedies,” Sarkozy told the Cyprus Mail during a hospital visit in the eastern city of Strasbourg.

The French president observed that similar “grave events occurred during these last weeks in health establishments in France, when families were hit by the brutal loss of a child, a husband of a mother, in dramas which affected also doctors, nurses, and all the staff,” and expressed “solidarity” and “sympathy to those who are suffering” from such tragedies.

Sarkozy was inaugurating a new high-tech hospital-university-research centre.

Professor Israel Nisand, director of the new hospital’s Neonatology and Maternity unit, said that, “in principle, the lives of babies infected by legionella can be saved”.

Nisand added that even the infected clinic in Nicosia, which has suspended inpatient services, could be easily disinfected from legionella, mainly by using a method called “heat shock”, which acts on the contaminated water used in a hospital’s ventilation.

“It can be done, if the right equipments are made available, and the right methods used,” he said.

Strasbourg’s new hospital is one of the few in France and Europe which “could help Cyprus” to overcome the present crisis by providing specific expertise or even tele-medicine, Professor Nisand said.