According to reporters, smokers in Spain have a few more months to light up in country’s restaurants, bars and cafes.

The federal government had planned to tighten the rules on smoking in public places in 2010, but, the Health Minister Trinidad Jimenez said that tougher restrictions are unlikely to be in place before the starting of next year.

While talking to media, the minister said that reforms of a 2006 law that suggested ban on smoking in the workplace and country’s metro, amid other locations, would be presented to Congress at the starting of June and debated the same month.

According to the Spanish government, it is aiming to extend its smoking ban at workplaces to bars, cafes, restaurants and other enclosed public areas by amending the anti-tobacco law in 2010.

In addition to this, all health as well as social rights groups welcomed the government’s decision.

However, around 30 percent of the Spain’s population admitted to smoking either daily or occasionally in a recent health study conducted in the country.

According to the recent news, meat and poultry from Spain has been banned temporarily in Qatar, following the detection of a new strain of bird flu virus-H7N7- in the country.

The decision was taken by the Joint Committee for Food Inspection in a meeting that took place in the premises of the Supreme Council of Health.

The immediate ban was imposed on all meat and poultry products from Spain, including fresh and frozen as well as eggs. H7N7 is a subtype of H1N1 and can infect humans, birds, pigs, seals and horses in the wild and has infected mice in laboratory studies.

According to the latest report by the Health Ministry and the International Registry of Organ Donation and Transplantation, Spain leads the world in organ donations.

The standard used to determine this fact is the number of deceased donors per million people and for Spain, this figure was 34.2 for last year. This was the best figure for any country in 2008.

For the whole European Union consisting of 27 countries, the figure came out to be 18.2, while for United States of America, it stood at 26.3.

According to the data revealed by the Spanish Ministry of Health, the swine flu cases went down during the last week.

Moreover, the figures revealed by the health ministry showed that the week of November 22-28 has recorded the fall for the first time in several weeks in the case of A/H1N1 flu in the country.

The level of infection in the nation stands at 243.71 cases per 100,000 inhabitants, with 105.304 new cases indexed in the last week.

However, a week ago, the infectivity level was 371.68 cases per 100,000 people with 158.942 new cases registered.

The Spanish Health and Social Policy Ministry announced that a total of 115 people have lost their lives due to A/H1N1 flu in the country, 27 deaths more than the last report for last week.

According to the ministry, the mortality rate of the disease is of 0.14 deaths per 1000 infected patients.

It was also anticipated by the ministry that there were 160,807 cases of clinic flu and 96.42 percent of them have been positive for A/H1N1 flu, which means 155,051 people are infected with flu in the country.