THE SIBLINGS of a child who develops swine flu will be able to continue to attend school even though their sick brother or sister will have to remain at home for seven days, the Health Service Executive (HSE) has said.
He said this was because if one person in a family got swine flu it didn’t mean they all would contract it.
“There have already been cases in families where it has not spread,” he said.
Meanwhile when asked how many children in a class would need to have the pandemic H1N1 flu before the class would be suspended and all children in it sent home, the HSE said each class issue will be judged on a school by school basis.
The HSE’s national director of population health, Dr Pat Doorley, has already said it was only if significant numbers of children or teachers developed symptoms that schools would be closed.
With many of the more than 800,000 primary and second-level students returning to school yesterday, the HSE said it received a number of queries about getting swine flu leaflets in minority languages for some children.
While leaflets have been printed in Polish, Chinese, French, Russian, Spanish and Arabic, the HSE said it hopes embassies representing smaller groups of people from different countries will use the information on swine flu on the HSE website (www.swineflu.ie) and translate it for their own communities.
The Irish National Teachers’ Organisation (INTO) said it had received only a small number of queries from schools on swine flu yesterday. “My assessment from conversations I had with schools is that the information campaign from the HSE has been heeded and there was a very calm return to school,” an INTO spokesman said.
In some schools children returned with their own handwashes, towels and supplies of tissues, heeding the message that the best way to prevent the spread of the pandemic virus is by always using tissues when coughing and sneezing and by regular handwashing.
Mary Mitchell O’Connor, principal of a primary school in Glasthule, Co Dublin, and a Fine Gael councillor for Dun Laoghaire Rathdown County Council, said she felt the Minister for Education should have written to all parents before the start of the academic year on swine flu and stressed how important it was for them to keep a child at home if they showed symptoms of the virus so as to protect other children.
While this information was on the HSE website it would not be accessible to homes that did not have broadband, she said.