SA braces for 2nd H1N1 outbreak

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Antoinette Pienaar

Johannesburg - A second outbreak of H1N1 flu could hit South Africa before next winter arrives.

Professor Barry Schoub of the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) said on Monday that one of the features of the pandemic (H1N1) 2009 virus was its unpredictability.

A second wave of the virus had already hit the USA, Europe and Britain with the arrival of winter, he said, adding that the amount of international travel to and from South Africa could lead to an increase in outbreaks this summer.

Schoub was speaking at the fourth annual meeting of the International Association of National Public Health Institutes.

No new H1N1 flu cases had been confirmed in the laboratories of the NICD over the past few weeks, the meeting heard.

More than 12 000 cases have been confirmed, and 91 South Africans have died of the disease.

Schoub hoped that South Africans would be protected to some degree as flu viruses were not transmitted as easily in the warmer summer months.

Flu vaccines

It was unclear how government's plans to obtain H1N1 flu vaccines for South Africa were progressing.

Schoub confirmed that the southern hemisphere had in principle agreed to make H1N1 flu one of the three strains of flu against which people would be inoculated in next winter's flu injection.

Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi said earlier that government wanted to buy about one million doses of the vaccine from Sanofi-Pasteur, Novartis and GlaxoSmithKline.

Schoub said he didn't know how government's plans were coming along and the department had not been answering the media's questions about the matter for some weeks.

It was unclear how government was planning to administer the one million doses among about 49 million South Africans.

Schoub said the country couldn't afford to vaccinate the whole population.

- Beeld