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Italy’s ex-PM Berlusconi discharged from hospital after six weeks

Baku. TurkicWorld:

Italy’s ex-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has been discharged from a hospital in Milan, where he was admitted more than six weeks ago suffering from a lung infection linked to leukaemia.

The 86-year-old billionaire media mogul left from the San Raffaele Hospital on Friday without making any comments.

Italian media showed footage and pictures of Berlusconi being driven away in a dark limousine smiling and waving to reporters waiting outside the hospital shortly after 1pm (11:00 GMT).

Berlusconi was admitted on April 5 and spent the first week and a half in intensive care before being moved to a normal ward.

Although he rarely appears in public, Berlusconi currently serves as a senator and as president of his right-wing Forza Italia (Forward Italy) party, a junior partner in Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s coalition government.

Meloni visited him in hospital on Sunday, saying afterwards he had been “in an excellent mood” and was still working “tirelessly”.

His health has also been an increasing concern.

Berlusconi was in hospital for 11 days for COVID-related pneumonia in September 2020, after contracting the virus while on holiday in Sardinia. He described it as “perhaps the most difficult ordeal of my life”.

After being admitted for treatment for a lung infection last month, doctors revealed that he had “chronic myelomonocytic leukaemia”, a rare type of blood cancer.

The disease, which affects mainly older adults, starts in blood-forming cells of the bone marrow and goes on to invade the blood.

Berlusconi’s cancer was in a “persistent chronic phase” and had not yet turned into “acute leukaemia”, the doctors said.

In March, Berlusconi was admitted to the same Milan hospital where he spent four days.

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