'Curiosity behind flu website hits'

Jul 24 2009

The unprecedented level of interest in a website to help diagnose swine flu was down to curiosity rather than people visiting the site because they had the disease, the Government's Chief Medical Officer said.

The National Flu Pandemic Website, which launched at 3pm on Thursday, was receiving 2,600 hits per second - or 9.3 million hits per hour - at around 5pm.

The huge volume of traffic caused the site to temporarily crash but it was running smoothly again a short time later.

Chief Medical Officer Sir Liam Donaldson insisted that the majority of people visiting the site had done so out of curiosity.

He told GMTV: "We would estimate around the very, very most that there were 20,000 out there when the flu line was switched on who might have had genuine flu. Nine million people decided to visit the site because there was such intense media interest in this story and many, many more people were aware of it than if it had moved into use in a routine way."

But Conservative health spokesman Mark Simmonds said the flu telephone and internet service should have been set up earlier when a global pandemic was declared.

He told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme: "Indeed, the fact that the website crashed yesterday (Thursday), within two to five minutes of it being up and running, I think is a function of the fact that it wasn't up earlier. Therefore people couldn't access the information, they couldn't discover themselves whether they had the appropriate symptoms that would give them the opportunity to get Tamiflu."

Meanwhile, a pregnant woman critically ill with swine flu is being treated in a Swedish hospital after being transferred for specialised treatment.

The 26-year-old Scot suffered a rare complication and was flown to Stockholm because no beds were available in the UK for the procedure she needed.

She was admitted to Crosshouse Hospital in Kilmarnock last week where she was put on a ventilator because of an extreme reaction to the H1N1 virus, and is now undergoing a highly-specialised procedure known as extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO). This involves circulating the patient's blood outside the body and adding oxygen to it artificially.