Special Report: Swine Flu

Posted by oheath on February 28, 2010 · 5 Comments 

From April 2009 and more so a couple of months later, Britain and the world was gripped in swine flu fever. With what was initially a global outbreak, the government and media highlighted the serious risks and concern for highly affected groups.

Even though broadcast and print media constantly updated us with the global death rate, fortunately, swine flu didn’t live up to its expected fears. Even health secretary, Sir Liam Donaldson said that swine flu was “less lethal than expected”.

When the National Pandemic Flu Service was launched, it went into meltdown with 2,600 hits per second. The online and telephone service provided a diagnosis of (H1N1) swine flu, registration, and assistance for collection of treatment. However, the service which only operated in England, now no longer exists. The service ceased at 1am on Thursday 11 February 2010. For those who think they may have swine flu, should now contact their GP for assessment.

The swine flu pandemic had a huge media following and certainly created a sense of moral panic across communities and societies around the world in its early stages.

Sir Liam Donaldson described the media interest as unprecedented, reaching ”Michael Jackson proportions.”

Swine flu leaflet

But the big questions we ask are:

1. Is swine flu over?

2. Was it all a huge over-reaction?

Swine flu has reportedly killed more than 400 people in Britain, and more than 100 are still in hospital with it. However, the help line closed because the number of people using it fell to fewer than 5,000 per week.

It should be noted that there are a lot of unused swine flu vaccine- millions of Tamiflu tablets remain in warehouses unused. The government ordered 90 million doses of the H1N1 vaccine, of which 30 million was from Baxter and 60 million from GSK.

As BBC medical correspondent, Fergus Walsh estimates,

“Around 5.25 million people have been vaccinated in Britain. That means there is an awful lot of vaccine – tens of millions of doses – going spare.”

Lets not be mistaken- swine flu hasn’t gone for good, there are just fewer cases compared to its peak. It could still come back, but what we now we know, is that this is a vaccine-preventable illness; so immunisation should prevent people from getting the virus in the future.

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