Swine flu blamed for Arab tourist fall

Salzburg tourism bosses have blamed swine flu for a 15 per cent drop in the number of Arab tourists in Salzburg’s Zell am See/Kaprun area.

Hans Wallner, director of tourism for the area, said today (Weds): "Demand for visits to our area was still high when we went on a marketing tour of Arab countries in May, but cancellations because of swine flu began occurring in June."

Wallner added the term swine flu was a problem for Arabs because the Koran calls pigs "unclean" animals.

He said though it was "too late" to do anything to counteract the negative impression the term had made in the Arab world.

Wallner said the timing of Ramadan, the month during which Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset, was also a problem for the area’s tourism industry.

Most Muslims wanted to stay at home during Ramadan, he explained, which meant Arab visitors would have left the Zell am See/Kaprun area by the middle of August and would probably not come back in late September.

Wallner said the local tourist industry can only hope that swine flu will no longer be a problem in summer 2010.

Arab visitors account for an average of 100,000 overnight stays each summer in the Zell am See/Kaprun area.
              
The number of confirmed swine flu cases in Austria has now reached 153 - with 138 of them coming in July as people returned from holidays abroad.

The health ministry said the first confirmed case in Austria had occurred on 28 April and there had then been no others until 2 June, and then only 14 confirmed cases in the entire month.

But the number rocketed in July, with new confirmed cases numbering 10 a day during the middle of the month, officials said.

Austrian Public Health General Director Hubert Hrabcik recently warned that a swine flu pandemic on the scale already seen in the UK would hit Austria.

He added that Austria’s strategy would change from "containment" to "mitigation" when a pandemic began.

The current strategy of containment includes the isolation in hospital of all patients suspected of having swine flu and laboratory tests to confirm the disease. Mitigation will feature fewer laboratory tests and more emphasis on proper treatment of cases at home.