If World Health Organisation experts decide today to declare a full global swine flu pandemic, the spread of the virus in Australia will have played a significant part in their decision.

Although Australia did not report its first case until May 9 - by which point 28 other countries had also reported swine flu infections to the UN agency - it now has the fifth largest number of cases in the world behind Mexico, the United States, Canada and Chile.

Incidents in the southern state of Victoria have leapt fourfold in a week - to over 1,000 - taking the total by today to 1,263, almost twice as many as in Britain.

According to WHO's own guidelines, a full Phase 6 pandemic implies sustained "community-level outbreaks" in at least two WHO regions, or continents. Experts in Australia say the large number of cases there mean a pandemic is already underway as winter begins to bite.

The virus is now uncontrollable and will 'inevitably' lead to deaths, Robert Booys, Professor of Child Health at the University of Sydney told The Times, who said that numbers have rocketed, particularly in Victoria, after taking hold in a number of schools.

"Once it started in the schools it became established in the community. We couldn't put the genie back into the bottle," said Professor Booys, who helped draw up Australia's pandemic flu plan.

"Victoria has been unfortunate. In most settings the virus is barely able to get into the community, but in Victoria it has propogated that much more quickly," he said.

Professor Booys could not explain why the numbers have risen so quickly in Victoria, although the state has endured a cold snap recently.

However, he suggested that a number of cases might have slipped through while the country's attention was focussed on the 'swine flu cruise ship' Dawn Princess, which was turned away from a number of ports because it was believed, wrongly, that the virus had spread among the passengers.

"Everyone was worried about passengers from the Dawn Princess spreading the virus around the country as they disembarked but in the meantime people were flying into Melbourne and they might not have been checked for symptoms," he said.

"All we will see now is an inexorable increase," he added. "It is not containable."

Most of the cases in Australia, like cases elsewhere in the world have shown only mild symptoms. Only 10 people have required hospitalisation, and there have been no deaths.

But Professor Booys warned that the virus could mutate or "drift" in the coming months. "We already know of cases where people have got double infections - both H1N1 and seasonal flu which allows reassortment," he said.

Last week, the Victorian state government moved from the contain phase of its pandemic plan to the sustain phase, a shift that suggests that state's authorities have accepted there is nothing they can do to halt the spread of the virus.

Quarantining people who make contact with those infected with the virus will no longer be recommended, and health authorities will concentrate on vaccines only for those at most risk of serious illness.

Kevin Rudd, the Prime Minister, said today that Australia has been the best prepared country in the world to deal with the threat of swine flu, with 10.3 million doses of vaccine available.

"Of all the countries in the world, this country has been best prepared in terms of the provision of anti-virals,'' Mr Rudd told reporters in Melbourne. "Because of the early action our government has taken we've made sure we're properly provisioned,'' he said.

As the number of cases rose, Singapore placed a travel warning on the state and authorities in two other states, New South Wales and South Australia, and in the capital Canberra have advised parents whose children have recently travelled to Melbourne to stay away from school for a week on their return home.

The entire squad and staff of the Brisbane Broncos rugby league club have been put into quarantine as tests are carried out on a player suspected of contracting swine flu.

- Victoria was also the first Australian state to fall to the 1918 Spanish flu. Maritime quarantine laws had kept Australia free of the virus in 1918 but Victoria dropped the quarantine law in 1919 ... and caught a cold.

Explore World News

• World Agenda

• Iraq News

• US & Americas News

• Europe News

• Middle East News

• Afghanistan News

• Asia News

• Africa News

• Ireland News

Times Recommends

• Tehran cannot live up to its rhetoric
• The new unicycle that will ‘change the world’
• We cannot wish away Iran’s bomb