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POLITIKOFF

Australian flu, how dangerous it is and what are the symptoms

Politiko 2024-11-05 10:17:49

Australian flu, how dangerous it is and what are the symptoms

The Australian group arrives in Italy, while cases have been registered in various Italian regions. What are the symptoms? How it is treated and why health experts raise the alarm.

What is Australian flu?

The Australian variant is caused by the H3N2 virus. It's a more aggressive disease than what we're used to dealing with practically every year, which has caused Australia's worst flu epidemic in ten years. As confirmed by Matteo Bassetti, director of infectious diseases at the San Martino polyclinic hospital in Genoa, the virus also affects the brain: in the case registered in Genoa, a 76-year-old man was no longer able to recognize his wife.

 "At the San Martino Polyclinic in Genoa, we have a first case of a 76-year-old patient, hospitalized for Infectious Diseases, who could not even recognize his wife - Bassetti wrote on Facebook - Among the first symptoms he told us were that he did not feel the taste of food when he ate".

This is a virus that affects not only the lungs, throat, but also the brain. It is an important fact, which has already come out of Australia and is the demonstration of the tropism of H3N2, so we should be vaccinated because if we had more such cases, or even encephalitis and neurological involvement from the flu, hospitals would have an excessive flow of patients and a difficult situation.

According to epidemiologist Pier Luigi Lopalco, it is a "worse" virus, with some still dark sides.

"The virus is always the same, only occasionally a part of it goes bad, for example, it can also cause neurological damage respiratory viruses, this type can cause a serious complication, the more we study it the more we learn to fear it. There is a certain attention - he added - And by further studying the effects of these viruses we find that these characteristics have always been observed in some way, but now they are being verified with greater attention", he says.

Being a variant of the "classic" flu, the symptoms are the same: high temperature, even over 38 degrees, muscle and joint pain, fever, fatigue and drowsiness, in addition to breathing problems, cough, nasal congestion and sore throat. In some cases, symptoms related to the digestive system such as nausea, vomiting and diarrhea may also occur, but what makes Australian flu so threatening is its ability to affect the central nervous system, causing neurological symptoms such as confusion. mental, intense headache and, in some cases, delirium, encephalitis and convulsions.

In the absence of complications, the flu lasts from 5 to 7 days, but it can obviously be longer in special cases or depending on age. Treatment therapy is that applicable to normal flu with anti-inflammatory drugs to keep body temperature under control. Antibiotics are completely useless, while antivirals always require medical advice.

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