Australia’s Health Minister, Jill Hennessy, has confirmed the death of a sixth person after an outbreak of ‘thunderstorm asthma’ in Melbourne.
The city’s Herald Sun reports that the outbreak has left five patients in intensive care, with three listed as critical. Another twelve people are receiving hospital treatment for “a variety of respiratory and other related conditions” after asthma attacks overwhelmed Melbourne’s ambulance and hospital systems.
The professional body of immunology and allergy in Australia and New Zealand, the ASCIA, says that thunderstorms and weather changes can trigger the so-called thunderstorm asthma epidemics:
“Some grass allergen like ryegrass are located on the surface of starch granules within pollen grains. A single pollen grain contains up to 700 starch granules small enough to reach the lower airways in the lung. When it rains or is humid, pollen grains can absorb moisture and burst, releasing hundreds of small allergenic particles that can penetrate deep into the small airways of the lung.
Not everyone who gets thunderstorm asthma has had it before. They have normally had severe pollen allergic rhinitis, and most have been found to be allergic to ryegrass. Presumably the massive load of small allergenic particles being inhaled straight into the lung trigger these attacks.”
Victims of the current outbreak, which follows similar epidemics in November 1987, November 1989 and 2011, include a twenty-year-old law student died who died in her family’s arms after waiting more than 30 minutes for an ambulance. A Dad of two and a teenage boy have also died as a result of the deadly weather event.
Australian media has revealed that most Melbourne hospitals did not follow the state’s health emergency plan during the unprecedented outbreak, despite Health Minister Jill Hennessy comparing its impact to 150 bombs going off across Melbourne. The State Health Emergency Response Plan says:
“When hospitals and health services respond to an external emergency, they will activate their Code Brown plan. Code Brown plans provide the additional capacity that hospitals need to receive an influx of patients. Once notified of an incident, hospital Code Brown response plans will be activated as the whole health service prepares to manage an influx of patients.”
Although the country’s Department of Health claims that it activated the response plan and that “all hospitals quickly activated their emergency response systems”, only three hospitals said that they called a Code Brown. Hennessy has now asked Australia’s Inspector-General of Emergency Management to review how the health crisis was handled.
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