Hong Kong is set to receive its first delivery of a swine flu vaccine before the flu season reaches its peak this winter. And according to Dr Alfred Tam, a specialist in paediatrics at Children at 818 in Central, 'the vaccine is very effective in children'.
The news will come as a welcome relief to concerned parents, but as Tam explained, the panic that caused school closures and hotel quarantines when swine flu first hit the city has largely abated due to a more thorough understanding of the virus by scientists, doctors and concerned parents.
'Parents tend to know now that although swine flu is one of the fastest spreading influenza viruses ever known, it is not the worst, and it does not often give rise to bad symptoms,' Tam said.
It was this knowledge combined with the experience of raising two children, Ruby aged two and Darcy aged four, that helped Paul Jordan and his wife Jeanie when they were told that Darcy had contracted swine flu.
'I wasn't panicked,' said Jeanie, an Australian primary school teacher who moved to Hong Kong with Paul about seven years ago. 'I knew it was quite common and I knew it would be sorted out.'
Unlike other strains of flu that Darcy had contracted in the past, Paul and Jeanie said that there was no sign that he was about to get sick until he went to their room at around 2.30am on a Sunday. 'He had a really high fever, that was all,' Jeanie said. 'There was no cough or runny nose, no other symptoms except he was really hot.'