Voiceover

The flu is more than a bad cold; cold symptoms last one to two days, while the flu can last up to a week. A cold can sometimes cause a mild fever, while the flu causes a high fever. Muscular pains and shivering attacks occur with the flu, while not with a cold. A cold causes a runny nose, while the flu starts with a dry sensation in the nose and throat.

Professor Robert Booy

Influenza is really quite different to the standard cold. You tend to have a higher fever, you feel much worse; a sore throat, really sore muscles and so sore that you really don't want to get out of bed. The kind of infection that happens to most people every five to ten years - that's how often most of us get influenza - and so it's really quite different to a cold. It poleaxes you.

Voiceover

Flu symptoms develop one to three days after infection and include high fever, chills and sweating, sore throat, weakness, headache and generalised muscle and joint pains, a non-productive cough that can become more severe and productive.

Flu is an illness that is potentially fatal, especially in the elderly or the very young whose immune systems aren't very strong. Over a million Australians who have chronic medical conditions of their lungs, hearts, diabetes - they should be vaccinated because they're at high risk of the complications of flu, and their underlying disease like diabetes can also go out of control.

Malinda Rutter (presenter)

Would you be better off not going to school if you had the flu, because then you're passing it around to everybody else?

Professor Booy

That's a really important distinction to make because people with influenza symptoms who come to work, who come to school are really going to spread it around and schools are breeding grounds for influenza. Within a few short weeks you can go from one or two cases up to most of the school affected, and really knock a school around in terms of the educational program.

This is a highly transmissible infection and losing two days of school for yourself personally, the difference between that and losing 20 days of school for all the kids in your class because you've given it to all of them - you need to get things in perspective - you are allowed those days off school.

Voiceover

The recommended treatment for flu is:

• Stay in bed and rest until the temperature has been normal for 48 hours
• Drink enough fluids to maintain normal urine output
• Take paracetamol to control fever, aches and pains
• Use antiviral medication early, as this may shorten the length and severity of illness
• Avoid exposure to dust, alcohol, fumes and tobacco smoke as much as possible
• Consult a doctor if symptoms such as difficulty breathing, coughing up green/yellow phlegm or severe headache develop.

Professor Booy

For a long time people have just talked about symptomatic treatment, and that's controlling the temperature and keeping the fluids up. But we do actually have a very effective drug that was invented in Australia - it's an anti-viral called Neuraminidase, and it's called by another name, zanamavir - this drug can treat influenza as long as you get treatment in the first two days of falling ill.

Malinda

Wow. And what about the flu vaccine?

Professor Booy

Flu vaccines are really effective - 70 to 90 percent effective in young people, children, and even older people in nursing homes you can get 50 to 60 percent protection, so that's pretty good.

Malinda

So if most of us were vaccinated and most of us stayed away from the workplace and school when we weren't well, would we see a great decline in the flu?

Professor Booy

It is a controllable infection and you know when they had SARS five years ago, in hospitals everyone washed their hands more carefully, they wore their masks. It wasn't just SARS they got rid of, they also got rid of flu; they didn't have any infections in the hospital because they were so careful. And the same thing can happen in the community with a bit of common sense.