While Skopje spent the night buying bottled water over one false message, the infectious diseases ward in Kumanovo examines more than a hundred patients every single day. That is not disinformation and it demands no press conference - it is a figure that has held for two months.

The general hospital in Kumanovo has recorded an increased number of gastroenterocolitis cases and other intestinal infections over that period. The head of the ward, Dr Valentina Džartovska, says the rise is especially pronounced in the summer months and affects every age group.

The causes are everyday ones, and that is exactly why they get overlooked: high temperatures, travel, and more frequent gatherings in larger groups. The most common symptoms are vomiting, diarrhoea and nausea, and in some patients also fever, stomach pain, headache, muscle pain and dehydration. Most cases pass with a mild clinical picture and need no hospitalisation.

Who is actually at risk

The risk of dehydration is greatest in small children and older people, especially those with chronic illnesses. The advice is blunt: replace fluids as soon as symptoms appear, and if the condition worsens - see a doctor.

For the summer, doctors recommend light food, proper food storage, thorough cooking and washing fruit and vegetables well. Personal hygiene is key, since intestinal infections most often spread by the faecal-oral route, and some of the viruses, norovirus among them, also pass between people.

The same figure, two different countries

In Skopje too the number of patients with stomach complaints is up. The director of the Clinic for Infectious Diseases, Dr Fadil Cana, said explicitly that the clinic has no data on anyone having gastrointestinal problems because of drinking water. „For now there is a normally elevated number, given this heat. The number is up, but it is not above normal compared with previous years.”

Cana made those remarks after a press conference at the health ministry - which had in fact been convened about the West Nile fever situation in the country.

And there is something worth noting there. Yesterday the entire country was discussing a bacterium that was not in the water. On the same day, at an official press conference, a disease that does exist was being reported - along with a ward in Kumanovo taking more than a hundred people a day for two months. None of it spread across social media.

Panic travels faster than data. That is not news. It would be news if the figure from Kumanovo got even a tenth of the attention that a message sent at midnight did.