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Swine flu - is it safe to travel?

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DN today published an extensive report on swine flu. The report was mainly about who should foot the bill when Sweden plans to mass vaccinate the population. Should it be the state or the county council, or should the population pay a certain amount themselves?

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Swine flu vaccine

The vaccine is not expected to be available until the end of September, which is quite interesting as the greatest spread of infection is expected at the start of the school year in August!? Now it may be that the vaccine will not be available earlier, but is it really cost-effective to vaccinate? In other words, how dangerous is this flu really?

"Mild flu"

According to the Finnish Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, this is a 'mild flu', but it should still be taken seriously, as it has a new genetic makeup and probably no one is immune. At the same time, a small number of young people have developed severe symptoms, which is of course scary.

So far, 602 cases have been reported in Sweden, most of them with a 'mild flu'. Not much to get excited about, you might think. And to a large extent, that's the feeling. Probably this is a wave that mainly brings with it a general feeling of fear, and soon we will forget it just as we forgot the bird flu or SARS or anthrax, and everything else we have been temporarily afraid of. So probably: calm in the storm!

Do you dare to travel abroad?

At the same time, I have met many people who wonder if they dare to go abroad. Maybe you will get infected there? The Ministry of Foreign Affairs does not currently advise against travelling abroad due to swine flu, which means that the risk is not considered imminent.

In other words, there are probably no problems. But every time you travel, you make your own risk assessment, and there are never any guarantees. If you want to know more about the distribution of swine flu in the world, you can take a look at this map from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.

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