Aussie flu just getting started

The virulent new strain of influenza now sweeping the country has a vastly increased potential for fatalities

THE super-charged Australian flu virus sweeping Ireland has affected people across the country in an alarming numbers and has created a crisis for the health service on a new scale.

It is now shaping up to be the country’s worst flu crisis in 50 years, with 20,000 patients swamping doctors’ surgeries and hundreds being admitted to hospital.

Figures from the Health Protection Surveillance Centre show the number of flu cases reported in Ireland durilar ing the first week of this year was 81pc higher than the same period last year.

Hospitals are already operating at capacity, but medical experts suggest this hyper-virulent flu strain has barely got started. According to the latest figures released last Wednesday, one in two people reported to be suffering from an infectious disease is struggling with influenza.

With its roster of tell-tale symptoms — sudden fever, aching body, sore throat, exhaustion, difficulty sleeping, loss of appetite — Australian flu sounds familiar enough. However, it is the strain’s ferocity, coupled with its unusually long recovery time (flu symptoms tend to subside after a week or so, but the socalled H3N2 strain can last much longer), the low-level effectiveness (20-30pc) of the current vaccine and the vastly increased potential for fatalities that have marked it out.

When H3N2 hit Australia last year, during their winter, it led to the country’s worst flu season for nearly a decade. The 72 reported deaths went well beyond the high-risk vulnerable group of young babies, the chronically sick and elderly. They included a mother-of-two in her 30s, a young father, an eight-yearold girl and an 18-year-old law student. Some 217,000 people were infected — many times more than the previous record of 100,000 in 2015.

The new strain has spread throughout Ireland exactly 100 years after Spanish flu, the world’s worst pandemic, killed upwards of 50 million people worldwide.

The threat of a repeat crisis on a similar scale is not far from the minds of international experts today.

“We will get another sim- virus again and we will potentially have another pandemic,” says Professor Wendy Barclay, an expert in virology at Imperial College London. “We hope not — but we can’t exclude the possibility.”

Flu virus mutates at random, producing a shape-shifting pathogen that can suddenly acquire deadly virulence. Intensively farmed pigs and poultry are particularly susceptible to flu outbreaks, as per the 2009 swine flu outbreak, with crowded living conditions providing a perfect environment for the development of mutations that can cross species into humans, potentially causing a new and deadly global pandemic to match the 1918 disaster.

“There is always the potential for viruses to emerge from animal sources,” says Prof Barclay. “It is not something you can accurately predict.”

“The basic problem is the instability of the flu virus,” says Professor Robert Dingwall of Nottingham Trent University, a former member of the UK’s flu pandemic planning committee. “All we can do is take the best guess on what strains have been around for the past two years.

“Australian flu is not new, but vulnerable people don’t seem to be responding as well to the vaccine as we might have hoped, and so it’s more serious.” He believes the false sense of security following many winters of relatively low-level flu infection could also have disastrous consequences “with more deaths and more hospitalisations”.

‘The vulnerable don’t seem to be responding as well to the vaccine’