Flu expert's chilling warning after last year's deadliest EVER strain claimed 800 lives
A top flu professor has warned the public to be on high alert and take extra precautions for the upcoming winter months, after last year's influenza season claimed up to 800 Australian lives.
Professor David Pilcher, of the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, recalled how intensive care units were inundated with patients during last year’s devastating flu epidemic.
“We had a large number of ventilated patients, we had patients on heart-lung machines, we almost ran out of dialysis machines to treat patients with kidney failure,” he said.
A report co-authored by Professor Pilcher in the New England Journal of Medicine found the number of people admitted to his intensive care unit with pneumonia or sepsis during September 2017 was the highest on record.
“In our intensive care unit, there were 30 ventilated patients, 17 patients that needed dialysis and eight patients on artificial hearts, which is a huge amount of really sick people,” Professor Pilcher told WA Today.
According to the report, 800 of the 3240 deaths in the ICU units around Australia were a direct result of the flu.
Although most people affected are aged 60 and over, he warned that the flu also afflicts the young.
“We saw many young people, particularly here at The Alfred, with very severe sepsis,” Dr Burrell said.
He said that while “it is too early to predict the severity of 2018 flu season [in Australia], we know that it was a bad flu season just passed in the northern hemisphere.”