Researchers are trying to determine why the H1N1 swine flu virus, much like the Spanish Flu of 1918, is lethal to a portion of young people in good health

“Pathologically, it’s identical to what happens with H5N1 infection,” known commonly as bird flu, said Shindo, the WHO doctor investigating case. “Pathologists say if they weren’t told it was H1N1 they would diagnose H5N1 as the cause.” An over-exuberant response [known as a cytokine storm] can worsen the effect by filling the lungs with fluid and cause permanent scarring that restricts the lungs.

“People are happy to dismiss serious cases among people with underlying conditions,” Barr said in an interview. “It’s a wake-up call when healthy people are struck down.”

In Australia, the median age of people dying from seasonal flu is 83. With the H1N1 swine flu, it is 54 years, according to the government’s Aug. 28 influenza surveillance summary report. In New South Wales, Australia’s most-populous state, the majority of H1N1 patients in intensive-care units are 30 to 59 years old, the state government’s Sept. 9 weekly report notes.

A week later, the breathing tube was inserted directly into Robb’s windpipe to avoid it damaging his vocal cords and to enable him to be brought out of the coma. Days later he was moved back to the wards and discharged on July 31. In less than three weeks, he had shed 13 kilograms (29 pounds) from his stocky, 75-kilo, 1.62-meter (5’4”) tall frame.

In New Zealand, about one in seven people hospitalized with H1N1 have needed intensive-care treatment, the Ministry of Health said in a Sept. 11 statement.

SHOOT: The scary part is you can be perfectly healthy, you can catch the flu and either die, or suffer very nasty symptoms and survive, or not even get infected.

clipped from www.bloomberg.com Robb’s illness began like most flu cases. Forty-eight hours after returning from a daylong business trip to Melbourne on July 9, he was laid up in bed. “I just thought it was the flu, but I couldn’t shake it,” he said over the telephone from his home on the outskirts of Christchurch, New Zealand’s third-biggest urban area. “I started getting rundown, then came the body shivers and sweats, and I felt very tired with a major, major headache.” Robb’s cough became so persistent on the evening of the fifth day of his illness that he moved to the sofa to avoid disturbing Gillies, he said. Having not eaten in days, he was pale, feverish, and too weak to sit up and panting rapidly, recalled Gillies, a 36-year-old bookkeeper. “I just wasn’t able to take deep breaths,” Robb said. Robb’s blood oxygen saturation was 58 percent, indicating his body was so dangerously starved of air that its tissues were being damaged.