# 3559
I’m always a bit slow to embrace these sorts of reports, preferring to see if the announced trend continues a week or two from now. But, if true, this may signify that the peak of H1N1 infections in Victoria has passed.
This report from Jason Gale of Bloomberg News.
Melbourne Lab, Doctors Find Swine Flu Infections Are Abating
By Jason Gale
July 30 (Bloomberg) -- Less than two months after a surge in swine flu cases in Melbourne helped persuade the World Health Organization to declare a pandemic, infections are abating in Australia’s second-largest city.
The frequency of flu-like illnesses diagnosed by the city’s doctors fell by a third last week from the previous week and is the lowest since late May, according to a report yesterday by the Victorian Infectious Diseases Reference Laboratory. The pandemic H1N1 strain accounted for all flu viruses tested by the government lab last week.
Melbourne was one of the cities hardest hit by H1N1 outside North America when the WHO declared the first influenza pandemic in 41 years on June 11. The decline in cases is also being reflected in a drop in hospitalizations for flu and may mean that Melbourne has seen the worst of the current wave of infections, said Vincent Pellegrino, an intensive care doctor at the city’s Alfred Hospital.
“We do seem to have passed the worst phase,” Pellegrino said in a telephone interview yesterday. Across Victoria, 26 people are hospitalized for flu, Australia’s health department said yesterday, down from 34 a week earlier and 59 on July 9.
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2 comments:
not sure yet, if this actually has been the main pandemic wave already ... So far the overall (per-inhabitant) impact of the Australian winter wave with about 40 fatal cases would be not much greater than the impact of the US 'summer' wave (300+ fatal cases but about 10 times more population)
So this would be a rather small 'main pandemic wave' then ... with a total attack rate well below the predicted 30-40%.
But as for the northern hemisphere the peak flu season is sometimes as late as March ... so the true peak is maybe still to come for the southern hemisphere.
Or it could even be (as I speculated in a previous comment) that the novel H1N1 is still not adapted well enough to the human population to cause the same overall attack rates than seasonal or previous pandmic H3N2,H2N2 viruses (both of which, although partly animal-origin were more human-like than swine flu H1N1).
So I'm curious if this trend of relatively "small" pandemic waves (as we have already seen in Mexico, US (particularly New York City) and now Australia continues.
If so, then the next country to report a flu peak would probably be the UK (any recent ILI-charts for the UK anyone ?)
Interestingly, the number of ILI presentations to Emergency Departments in NSW also fell last week: see the first graph in my post here, http://ozswineflu.wordpress.com/2009/07/29/nsw-health-weekly-epidemiology-report-29th-july/.
Still, I'm not optimistic that this thing has peaked over here.Normally, seasonal flu doesn't peak here until August or September. I've graphed the last few years here: http://ozswineflu.wordpress.com/2009/07/16/how-much-worse-is-this-than-normal-redux/
Cheers, Nick.
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