Eight patients with a confirmed neuroinvasive form of West Nile fever have been hospitalized at the Clinic for Infectious Diseases. The eighth death from this virus was registered over the weekend. It is a seventy-year-old patient, who was admitted on August 25 in extremely serious condition, the Infectious Diseases Clinic director Fadil Cana informed the public at a press conference Monday.
Of the eight hospitalized patients, two have a more severe clinical picture and are in the intensive care unit, intubated and on mechanical ventilation. The director of the Infectious Diseases Clinic added that except for one patient from SvetiNikole, all the others are from Skopje and are over the age of 60.
He noted that no new patient with confirmed West Nile fever has been admitted to the Clinic for Infectious Diseases for four days, otherwise patients being treated at this Clinic have been infected in the country. So far, 55 indigenous cases have been registered in Macedonia and one case with a history of travel to Greece, but the incubation period also covers a stay in Macedonia. Of the registered cases, 44 or 78.7% are male, and 12 or 21.3% are female. In terms of age distribution, the majority are people over 60 years old – 45 (80.4%), seven are people aged 50-59, one person aged 30-39, and three people aged 20-29. The average age is 65.8 years.
