tetano
Editor, Senior Moderator
In March 2009, Paul Forrest took receipt of a dense metal box the size of an Esky. It is likely to be the most prescient bit of shopping he will ever do.
Weeks later the $100,000 device, Australia's first portable life-support machine able to fully take over the function of both heart and lungs, was at the centre of a statewide rescue mission as dozens of previously healthy young people suddenly became disastrously ill - victims of the H1N1 swine flu epidemic that swept the country that winter.
''It was incredible. We'd only just landed the [machine] and the fear was we'd be sitting on our hands,'' says Forrest, a clinical associate professor and head of cardiothoracic anaesthesia and perfusion at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital. He had lobbied NSW Health for the equipment with the intensive care unit head, Robert Herkes, and colleagues at St Vincent's Hospital. ''But from the first week of June the phone didn't stop ringing. We'd budgeted to do one case a month for the whole state. We did 24 in the first two months.''
In the process, the NSW experience has rewritten the rule book on how to care for people who become critically ill far from a major hospital - achieving life-saving transfers across what had until then been considered unfeasible distances and narrowing the survival gap between country and city people.
But 2? years ago that pattern had not yet begun to emerge from the engulfing chaos. Forrest vividly recalls the patients. Many were obese, putting extra strain on their lungs. But their weight also appeared to give them extra reserves. ''It's the scrawny middle-aged men who don't make it,'' Forrest says.
With no resistance in the community, except among older people exposed to a similar flu strain before 1950, the infection rampaged through the bodies of susceptible people. It caused overwhelming pneumonia, flooding lungs with, ''a very watery infiltrate ? you could pull about 100 millilitres of greenish fluid'', Forrest says.
http://www.thecourier.com.au/news/national/national/general/breath-of-fresh-air/2330122.aspx
Weeks later the $100,000 device, Australia's first portable life-support machine able to fully take over the function of both heart and lungs, was at the centre of a statewide rescue mission as dozens of previously healthy young people suddenly became disastrously ill - victims of the H1N1 swine flu epidemic that swept the country that winter.
''It was incredible. We'd only just landed the [machine] and the fear was we'd be sitting on our hands,'' says Forrest, a clinical associate professor and head of cardiothoracic anaesthesia and perfusion at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital. He had lobbied NSW Health for the equipment with the intensive care unit head, Robert Herkes, and colleagues at St Vincent's Hospital. ''But from the first week of June the phone didn't stop ringing. We'd budgeted to do one case a month for the whole state. We did 24 in the first two months.''
In the process, the NSW experience has rewritten the rule book on how to care for people who become critically ill far from a major hospital - achieving life-saving transfers across what had until then been considered unfeasible distances and narrowing the survival gap between country and city people.
But 2? years ago that pattern had not yet begun to emerge from the engulfing chaos. Forrest vividly recalls the patients. Many were obese, putting extra strain on their lungs. But their weight also appeared to give them extra reserves. ''It's the scrawny middle-aged men who don't make it,'' Forrest says.
With no resistance in the community, except among older people exposed to a similar flu strain before 1950, the infection rampaged through the bodies of susceptible people. It caused overwhelming pneumonia, flooding lungs with, ''a very watery infiltrate ? you could pull about 100 millilitres of greenish fluid'', Forrest says.
http://www.thecourier.com.au/news/national/national/general/breath-of-fresh-air/2330122.aspx