Responsibility needed this flu season

By Graham Cooke

I suppose it must be the chill in the air this Easter weekend, the hint of brown among the green in Canberra's leafy suburbs, but suddenly the stories about the flu season are making their appearances in the media again, along with grim predictions about how Australia is unprepared and the likelihood that a virulent outbreak could overwhelm the health system.

It is difficult to know how much more prepared Australia could be. We have more than enough vaccine stored to combat a repeat of last season's swine flu outbreak, and if the virus has mutated in the meantime, what can we do, we have scientists, not magicians.

That hasn't stopped Professor Peter Collignon, described as a Canberra infectious diseases specialist, who claims to have found a litany of problems with Australia's response to the previous winter's outbreak of swine flu.

The good professor acknowledges that the 191 associated deaths with swine flu in Australia last year were well below the regular 3000 deaths linked to ordinary strains of influenza, that year and every year.

However "there may have been additional influenza-associated deaths that were not diagnosed by laboratory testing," he says.

Maybe, maybe not. Whatever the case, we were not exactly burning the bodies in the streets.

And, of course, the media is to blame for it all. The 'disproportionate fear' generated by their reports leading to people crowding into medical practices and hospital emergency departments when all they needed was a couple of days at home in bed.

Of course the media always loves a good doom-and-gloom story - that's why Professor Collignon is getting coverage - but isn't it time people took more charge of their lives instead of fleeing into the arms of the professionals at the first hint of a sniffle?

I have a friend who travelled to Taiwan and China during the height of the swine flu 'emergency' last year and came back with an undeniably heavy cold.

Instead of running off to her doctor or the nearest hospital, she got on to the well-publicised flu hotline and discussed her symptons with the nurse at the other end. The nurse asked her if she had a fever - she didn't - so the fast-track diagnoses was that it was very unlikely she had any kind of flu, let alone swine flu, and to take a day off to recover.

That was spot on. The cold cleared and she was back at work without wasting the time of medical professionals at clinics, surgeries or hospitals.

If a few more of us took this sensible and responsible course then there would be no danger of Professor Collignon's dire predictions about health system overload coming true.