source: Critical ventilators to help Canada cope with the swine flu outbreak are being ordered by the federal government amid dire warnings about the severity of this fall’s flu season.
As the pandemic spreads globally, Canadian public health findings show – for unknown reasons – that victims here have been younger and sicker, and have required more ventilators than most other countries, including the United States.
For years, medical experts have been worried about the small number of intensive care nurses who would be available to treat patients during an influenza pandemic. But the first wave of the H1N1 virus, which killed 29 people in Canada and sent 663 to hospital as of Friday, has exposed another shortfall in national pandemic planning: the number of ventilator machines.
One young man arrived at the Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto more than a month ago with symptoms of the disease, which was subsequently confirmed. He was put on an oscillatory ventilator – a measure that is used only rarely for patients with a standard type of influenza. Four weeks later, he was still hooked up to the machine.
“It appears that there is a sub-population of relatively young people who very rapidly develop severe illness with this virus. And they are not a large number, but they require very intensive ventilatory support with new advanced ventilators,†said Allison McGeer, an expert in infectious disease at Mount Sinai.
“We have very few oscillatory ventilators. We generally don’t need them very often and usually it’s for a very short period of time. So these young people are requiring a disproportionate amount of time on ventilators that we have very small numbers of.â€
Share on Facebook
No recent related articles were found.
