Jury still out on our ability to cope with swine flu

THE sweat drips off your face into a pool on the ground. A headache you have been nursing for days continues to pound, and the room begins to spin. You feel at death’s door. And that’s before anything is even wrong with you.

While the threat posed by swine flu remains clear, since the infection first emerged the confusion over how Ireland will cope with a major outbreak has caused almost as many problems as the virus itself.

After the initial April outbreak, the World Health Organisation (WHO) urged the public to prepare for a plague on a par with our near biblical financial demise.