Australians told to prepare for increase in swine flu cases
Updated
The number of swine flu cases in Australia has doubled in one day to more than sixty and Australians are being told to prepare for a large increase still to come. The Australian government says there's no need to panic, though a vaccine is still some months away.
Presenter: Linda Mottram, Canberra correspondent
Speaker: Nicola Roxon, Australian Health Minister; Professor Jim Bishop, Australia's Chief Medical Officer; Dr Peter Collignon, Director, Infectious Diseases Unit and Microbiology Department, Australian National University College of Medicine and Health Sciences.
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(FX tv ad) The flu and you -- the government is closely monitoring ....
MOTTRAM: Winter, the traditional flu season, is closing on Australia and the newspaper headlines are warning swine flu's spreading fast. Now the government's begun a television ad campaign.
(FX tv ad) ... if you are unwell seek medical advice and try to avoid close contact with others.)
MOTTRAM: The ads began running as the country's health minister, Nicola Roxon, broke the news at her daily briefing on H1N1 of a doubling of confirmed cases in just 24 hours, with more certain to come.
ROXON: We now know that this disease is highly infectious and the community does have to prepare itself for there to be a significant increase in the numbers of cases that are confirmed particularly in the coming days.
MOTTRAM: The government's still providing daily updates of those confirmed to have the disease, its now no longer going to give numbers for those being tested .. the numbers are just too great to be accurate the minister says.
As well as those cases confimed inside Australia, there are a number of suspected cases of infected Australians in Korea, China and the Philippines. Domestically, six schools are closed .. this is known to be a young person's disease. Authorities are searching for more than 170 people who were allowed to go home from a cruise ship of two-thousand, despite their complaints about flu-like symptoms. Another two-thousand passengers then embarked on the same ship -- and that ship's now being held offshore with more suspected H1N1 cases. The incidents are potentially undermining the climate of calm control Australian officials are trying to maintain.
Health minister Nicola Roxon says there's no need to panic, that most people get only mild symptoms .. but she also sounds a caution.
ROXON: We do know that this swine flu has a quite hard edge to it. That is, a small proportion of cases can be much more severe and we have seen that in some of the deaths that have occurred in the United States.
MOTTRAM: Australia's Chief medical officer, Professor Jim Bishop, says the late arrival of the disease in Australia has given the country an advantage over it.
BISHOP: We've got an opportunity now to substantially modify the disease which we've been able to because we're a month down the track compared to many other countries. As we jump on each case and give them Tamiflu then we reduce the infectivity.
MOTTRAM: One of Australia's most respected infectious diseases experts, Doctor Peter Collignon, says the impact of this flu will be serious. But while its reasonably readily transmissable, Doctor Collignon says its not like the infamous flu outbreak of 1918 and nothing like SARS that's easily spread between humans and has a mortality rate as high as ten per cent.
COLLIGNON: This has a mortality rate considerably lower than that. Probably for every 1000 people that get infected, maybe one person might die from it and it may even be less than that because if there are many more cases for instance in the US that are mild and people only had mild symptoms a lot of those cases may have gone undetected so the overall rate is likely not to be any higher than what we see every winter.
MOTTRAM: And Professor Collignon says many deaths from the 1918 flu were not actually from the virus.
COLLIGNON: It wasn't actually the influenza that killed people. It was probably bacterial pneumonia, with the golden staff germ, the pneumonia germ and we have antibiotics now and i think that's reflected by the much lower rates that we saw in the 50s and 60s when we had new strains that came through.
MOTTRAM: We are though still hearing talk about a second round, is that a possibility, that a second time round perhaps once it goes through the southern hemisphere winter and heads north that it can become more troublesome to us?
COLLIGNON: Yes it is I mean any virus can pick up new genetic material and change and become more aggressive or virulent but equally we could say that for every winter. I mean just about every winter we have a new designed flu that develops for us in the northern hemisphere and comes and is different and that's why people get sick and equally they could have become more virulent, but equally it may become less virulent.
MOTTRAM: And with sufficient antibiotics to combat the infections that kill most flu patients, as well as a large stock of anti-viral treatments, Australia would seem to be well positioned in the face of a generally mild new flu .. though governments may suffer the related symptoms of a political backlash depending on their management of the issue.
