SYDNEY (AFP)
- Health officials on Wednesday warned athletes and tourists arriving
for the Olympics to seek vaccines for a 'flu virus now threatening
millions here after claiming at least two lives.
Two children
have already died and up to 800,000 people overall have been infected
during Sydney's seasonal influenza epidemic, state health authorities
for New South Wales told AFP.
Every influenza
epidemic claims lives, so visitors over 65 years old, or with
a history of respiratory illness visiting Sydney, should get a
vaccination, a senior Health Department epidemiologist said.
As the number
of flu cases rises, the Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic
Games (SOCOG) has offered vaccinations to all athletes.
Elite sports
men and women, along with the elderly, children and respiratory
illness sufferers, are ironically most vulnerable to the virus.
Two strains
of the virus, known as Sydney influenza types A and B, swept Britain
and Europe during recent northern hemisphere winters, claiming
dozens of lives.
A New South
Wales Health Department epidemiologist, Jeremy McAnulty, said
that up to one-fifth of Sydney's four-million strong population
could be affected.
"Typically,
the flu comes into a community and affects 10 to 20 percent of
the population," McAnulty said.
"We encourage
vaccinations, but particularly stress them to people over 65."
The sick,
frail and elderly were the most likely to develop fatal complications,
he said.
"It is
what you would expect in any community," McAnulty said.
"In context
of a flu epidemic, you expect...deaths among people at risk."
Local health
authorities advise that all Australians aged over 65, and Aborigines
over 50, to seek vaccinations as a matter of course.
US Olympic
team members have already been prescribed anti-flu medication.
"These
athletes have prepared their whole lives to compete in the Olympic
Games, so it is important that we take appropriate measures to
keep everyone participating healthy," Brock Schnebel, the
US Olympic Committee's senior physician, said last month.
A senior physician
at the New Children's Hospital in Sydney told the Daily Telegraph
the number of children needing medical treatment during the outbreak
had doubled in the past two weeks, and two of them had died.
"We are
getting a peak in our flu season now and it's appearing later
than it did last year," Alison Kesson said.
"We haven't
had a bad winter at all, but in the last week or two, we've had
an upsurge.
"There's
been a resurgence and most of it is influenza Sydney A,"
she said.
The World
Health Organisation issued a flu warning for Sydney earlier this
month.
"If I
was an Olympic athlete, I would have had my flu shots," Alan
Hampson, a doctor attached to the WHO's Collaborating Centre For
Influenza, said.
Hampson warned
Olympic crowds provided an ideal environment for transmission
of the virus.
Seasonal influenza
breakouts usually occur here between July and September here,
or the winter and early spring months in the southern hemisphere.
Symptoms of
the virus include fever, muscle pain, persistent cough, headache
and throat irritation.
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