in yesterday’s Oxford Mail we called for greater transparency over the school at the centre of Oxfordshire’s only confirmed swine flu case.

Patient confidentiality must be respected, and neither we, or the public, had any intention of hounding the youngster’s family.

She has since made a full recovery and it seems there have been no other suspected cases.

But the silence over which school the six-year-old attended left a huge question mark in parents’ heads.

Thousands will have been wondering whether their child’s school was affected.

Health bosses went to great lengths to stress how fellow pupils and staff were not at risk.

They insisted that because the child had shown no symptoms while at school there was no need to name it.

It eventually emerged that the girl was at Sandhills Primary School, in Oxford.

But it looks as if it took almost a week for parents to hear anything concrete.

And, while the rumours bubbled away at the school gates, the concerns generated by Chinese whispers grew.

None of this is helpful.

It is not acceptable for parents to be kept in the dark.

Furthermore, the primary care trust’s decision to say one six-year-old had swine flu, somewhere in Oxfordshire, but then refuse to tell people where, was unfortunate, to say the least.

The Oxford Mail believes parents had a right to know.

The media has been blamed in the past few weeks for whipping up a storm over swine flu.

But, in this case, a failure by the authorities to present the real facts was the real cause for concern.

We all hope this is the last time swine flu will hit our county, but, of course, we have no guarentee. If it does re-emerge, let’s hope lessons will have been learned from this incident.