washingtonpost - A thunderstorm, one of several to strike southeastern Australia during this year’s humid November spring, triggered a rash of asthma attacks across Melbourne on Monday. The deadly respiratory blitzkrieg left families grieving in its wake.
The asthma attacks during the storm claimed at least four confirmed victims: 20-year-old law student Hope Carnevali, pictured above, died while waiting for responders from Ambulance Victoria to arrive. Paramedics struggled to resuscitate 35-year-old Apollo Papadopoulos, who eventually succumbed to the respiratory attack.
Omar Majoulled, 18, died two days before what would have been his high school graduation. A fourth victim, Clarence Leo, was reported deceased early Wednesday. Several more remained in Melbourne’s intensive care units.
The outbreak was severe even for those whose symptoms were mild under usual circumstances. “It felt like an elephant had his foot on my chest for about four hours,” said David McGann, from the Melbourne suburb of Preston, to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. McGann said his asthma attacks were not normally worrisome, but during the storm they were crushing.
By late Monday night, Melbourne pharmacies had depleted their stocks of bronchodilator medication. Emergency calls flooded in. Carnaveli’s relatives said they waited for more than a half an hour for an ambulance to arrive. “We would have taken her straight there, we wouldn’t have waited,” her uncle, John Carnaveli, told Melbourne’s 3AW Radio.
Between 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. on Monday, Ambulance Victoria fielded about 1,900 calls, nearly six times the usual volume.
“We essentially had a day’s workload within five hours,” said Ambulance Victoria’s executive director, Mick Stephenson, in a statement. “This includes 200 cases for asthma, and we were seeing asthma in people who had not experienced breathing issues before.”
At their peak, 200 calls came within a span of 15 minutes. “That’s a call every 4.5 seconds,” Stephenson said.
Ambulance Victoria put 50 extra ambulances into service, and police and firefighters responded to two dozen calls as well. The state’s Inspector General for Emergency Management announced it would review the spike in emergency demand and Ambulance Victoria’s response.
Since the first such events were recognized in the 1980s, there have been scattered reports of asthma attack outbreaks during thunderstorms around the globe, including Napoli, Italy and Atlanta. The largest confirmed episode to date was in London in June 1994. Six hundred-forty Londoners visited emergency departments with complaints of asthma or respiratory problems, of which more than a hundred were hospitalized, according to a 2016 reviewpublished in the journal Clinical & Experimental Allergy. (FullText)
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