they have no idea why there had been a snowballing of cases

Liam Donaldson chief medical officer of The Health Protection Agency in the UK has used the word ‘snowballing’ to describe the rise in the number of patients requiring hospital care after contracting the swine influenza virus.  While pointing out that the overall number of cases is on the decline more individuals seem to end up being hospitalised. The figures show that there are now almost 850 swine flu patients in hospital (compared to less than 300 for September) and 172 of them are in critical care wards.

Professor Donaldson said that at present they have no idea why there had been a “snowballing of cases” but as far as they knew the virus had not mutated into a different form. He explained that the same thing had happened in the southern hemisphere and there were no answers yet. Overall it was a estimated that there were 84,000 new cases of swine influenza in England alone which showed an increase of 6,000 from the previous week, a rise of almost eight percent and that in the week before that the number of probable new cases was up by almost 50 percent.

Other statistics released by The Health Protection Agency were that around 620,000 individuals are thought to have contracted the swine flu virus since it first broke out and that less individuals were going to their doctors complaining of flu symptoms which was probably due to the lessening fear of the virus. Just over 100 people have died from the swine flu virus in England but the HPA did say that not all of these could be directly attributed to the virus because severe underlying health conditions also played a significant part in some of the deaths.

In the absence of a swine flu vaccine the best treatment for the virus as recommended by the World Health Organisation is Tamiflu.