Manitoba Health and Healthy Living reported the province's fifth laboratory-confirmed swine flu death Monday.
The latest victim is believed to be 43-year-old Perry Chernesky, 43, pastor of Oakbank Baptist Church, located about 15 kilometres east of Winnipeg. People in the community said during a church service last Sunday that Chernesky had the swine flu virus.
Provincial officials refused to confirm the identity of the latest victim. The total of confirmed cases in Manitoba remains at 685.
Influenza A (H1N1) is the name of a whole category of viruses. Scientists who have examined genetic material from the current pandemic say that most of it comes from viruses known to infect pigs, hence the name swine flu. In its most virulent form, influenza A (H1N1) caused the world pandemic in 1918. Estimated to have killed up to 30 million people worldwide, that outbreak came to be known as the Spanish flu.
At the moment, the provinces and federal government are scrambling to buy more oscillatory ventilators, which are receiving unprecedented demand. As the pandemic spreads globally, Canadian public health officials are finding victims here have been younger and sicker, and have required more ventilators than most other countries, including the United States.
The Public Health Agency of Canada owns 130 oscillatory ventilators. Fifteen of them were recently sent to Manitoba. The ventilators cost about $10,000 each. A week ago, 38 intensive care unit (ICU) beds in Winnipeg were occupied by patients on ventilators.
The Canadian Pandemic Influenza Plan, citing a 2005 research paper produced by the Joint Centre for Bioethics of the University of Toronto, identifies ethical issues that could arise during an influenza pandemic, including the allocation of scarce resources such as ventilators. One of the assumptions has been that ventilators would go to younger people rather than to older people, if hard choices had to be made, but a choice of putting one young person rather than another young person on a ventilator is not a scenario that had been contemplated in the planning exercise.
Swine flu is spreading so rapidly across Britain that there could be 100,000 new cases a day by the end of next month, the health secretary, Andy Burnham, said July 2, meaning the United Kingdom would immediately move to the treatment phase of its plan to combat swine flu and abandon containment efforts. Doctors would no longer test for the H1N1 virus.
Several cases of people having swine flu viruses resistant to oseltamivir, an antiviral better known by its trade name, Tamiflu, have now turned up in Denmark and Hong Kong.
The World Health Organization (WHO) reported 94512 cases of swine flu worldwide as of July 6 causing 429 deaths.
