Swine Flu- don't panic

Hi, I’m Dr Abu Chinwala, a GP in Hampshire, and a founding partner of Southdowns Private Healthcare. Every month I will be writing a blog about topical, medical matters to offer advice based on my experience as a frontline GP dealing with patients’ concerns everyday in my surgery.

This month’s topic is unsurprisingly, Swine Flu. Much of my patients’ concerns and anxiety is fuelled unfortunately by imbalanced reporting in the media. When you read the papers, try to keep some perspective. Remember horror stories sell, an uncomplicated bout of flu does not. Every patient I have seen so far with Swine Flu has made a complete recovery within 7 to 10 days.

To help offer some perspective, I compare the current situation to an epidemic of ordinary seasonal flu in the winter of 1997, when I was working as a Medical Assessment Unit doctor in Cheltenham. The medical take jumped from an average of 25 patients per day to more than 40. It was mainly the lives of the elderly that were lost, often complicated by underlying heart or lung disease. The morgue was so busy that the hospital had to arrange for mobile refrigerators to store the deceased. Imagine rows of trucks forming a mobile morgue parked in a hospital car park - and Cheltenham was by no means an exception. But where were the press? Where were the horror stories? There were none. We’ve been through worse and though this winter may challenge that of 1997, life for most of us will go on as normal.


The views expressed in this blog are those of Dr Abu-Talib Chinwala BM MRCGP and not of any organisation he works for.