The nihilism displayed in reporting swine flu deaths is disturbing. Dismissing deaths as being due to co-morbidities that the day before infection would have not been considered a problem to people leading normal lives, leads me to wonder where the line of serious co-morbidity is when it relates to swine flu mortality. A little seasonal asthma? Breast cancer in remission? Fat guy? Healthy pregnant woman? I think that the pandemic planners have long resigned themselves to high rates of mortality, and they set about fulfilling the prophecy with a palliative care approach to this problem, all softly softly and lots of serious sounding stages of non-alarm rather than a ring the town bell, let’s rescue-all-who-can-be. It’s wrong to yell fire in a theatre but it’s also wrong to ignore the fire.

In the effort to calm the masses, mistakes are being made. That main mistake is lack of speed in diagnosis and treatment.

GPs, pharmacists, EDs, village nurses all require access to Point of Care tests for influenza. Those tests exist. More like 15 than 5 minutes, but certainly better than 1800 minutes. They are not specific to H1N1 but who cares? It’s more important to confirm influenza quickly, presume H1N1, and act.

Then treatment should be offered to everyone with the disease and anyone around that disease case who feels even slightly off colour. That’s why we have the stockpile. A question: how many people who died or have been admitted to ICU with H1N1 commenced treatment with antivirals at the onset of the illness? My understanding of the scant detail released on cases here in Australia, is that people who died were not treated promptly with antivirals.

The effort to calm the public is lulling some health professionals into thinking the problem isn’t serious. Wrong. If we could avoid three jumbo jets crashing we would act urgently and with concentrated effort. Three jumbo jets’ worth of swine flu deaths are worth acting with the same urgency. Today our Health Minister said that claims of 10,000 deaths from this pandemic was ludicrous nonsense. It could be more like 6,000 she said. Oh, that’s fine then, nothing to worry about, then. You fat, pregnant, asthmatics: step forward.