Rare thunderstorm asthma kills 4 people in Australia

Though normally hay fever occurs in the nasal area, the freak weather conditions which cause thunderstorm asthma can drive the allergens deep into the lungs, causing a far more severe asthmatic attack.

The State Emergency Service is still responding to hundreds of calls for assistance, with over 13,000 homes left without power last night and over 350 calls for help in response to damaged homes and trees down.

“Our thoughts are with the families of those patients”.

St Vincent’s Hospital, Melbourne, said that it ran out of Ventolin puffers, which are used to relax muscles in the airways during asthma attacks.

More than 2,000 calls for ambulances flooded the system in just five hours, almost seven times more than average -including a call every four to five seconds from 7pm to 715pm. If you feel like you’re sensitive to adverse events like “thunderstorm asthma”, check the pollen count daily.

At one point, there were 140 code one cases occurring at the same time.

Ten more minutes passed, and the sister tried to contact ambulance services again, receiving a similar answer, the person at the end of the line instructing them to wait.

During the storm on Monday, 74 percent of those surveyed by the University of Melbourne had reported experiencing symptoms, and 32 percent reported that they had not had asthma symptoms before, CNN reported. The situation was labeled as a health emergency of “unprecedented scale”, with more than 8,500 patients registered on November 21 and 22.

Professor George Braitberg, director of emergency medicine at The Royal Melbourne Hospital, said the event was one of the most extraordinary occasions in his entire career.

“My son’s never even had asthma before, none of us have”.

Victim Palli Zamani with his mother Rayann Zamani.

Some of those who experienced the worst symptoms had asthma; others said they had not suffered asthma-related symptoms since childhood.

“It is a big wake up call for people with asthma in the community”. “He was fine earlier in the day, it was just in the evening that it started.We didn’t know what it was”.

“It is expected this will be closely examined as part of the Inspector-General of Emergency Management’s state-wide review”. Experts say incidents of thunderstorm asthma have been seen in the UK, US, Italy and Canada, but the condition is “very under reported”, said Newbigin.

“This was a health emergency of an unprecedented scale and we have an obligation to ensure that we learn every lesson there is to learn from this event”, Hennessy said.

“There always are in these cases”, she said.

In one circumstance, the ambulance took more than half an hour to arrive due to the high volume of calls.