“It must be fairly close to moving into phase 6,” said MacIntyre, who is also professor of infectious diseases epidemiology at the university in Sydney. “It’s clearly spreading in the community in Victoria.”
“Our guess is that for every confirmed case there is somewhere between 2 and 10 unconfirmed cases,” she said, adding that some states were testing more extensively than others.
SHOOT: I'm recovering from the flu here in South Africa, and I know so many people who've either just caught it, still have it or just had it.
June 1 (Bloomberg) -- Swine flu cases in Australia,
doubling about every two days, may convince the World Health
Organization to declare the first influenza pandemic in 41
years, said Raina MacIntyre, head of public health at the
University of New South Wales.
Australia has 401 confirmed cases of the new H1N1 influenza
strain, the Department of Health and Ageing in Canberra said in
a statement today. The tally, the highest outside North America,
has risen from 20 on May 25.
Victoria has 306 cases, up from 173 two days earlier,
reflecting the spread of the virus within communities in the
southeastern state. Evidence that swine flu has gained a
foothold in Australia may compel WHO Director-General Margaret
Chan to raise the pandemic alert to the highest of the agency’s
six-step system, MacIntyre said in a telephone interview today.
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