Ontario Health Minister David Caplan wants the federal government to fast-track the country's H1N1 vaccine, as data shows that the province may already be in the throes of the swine flu's second wave.
Caplan said Thursday his province is ready to get the vaccines out, but that it has been hamstrung because Health Canada has yet to obtain the manufacturer's license.
The vaccine has been produced in Quebec, but it won't be available until Ottawa ensures the shots are effective and safe.
But Caplan warned that it could take three more weeks to jump those regulatory hurdles.
There have been three new confirmed cases of swine flue this week in Toronto alone, following weeks of few new cases.
"It looks like the second wave is starting," Dr. Barbara Yaffe, director of communicable disease control and associate medical officer of health for Toronto Public Health, told CTV Toronto Thursday.
Dr. Donald Low, chief microbiologist at Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital, also thinks the second wave is already upon us. He told the Toronto Star Thursday that he's seeing an uptick in cases, noting that the new flu activity is so far concentrated in Toronto, Hamilton and London.
There have been very few cases of H1N1 in Ontario over the last several weeks, he said, but on Monday, six new cases in the province were confirmed. Those cases are "probably announcing the second wave of H1N1," he said.
Yaffe notes that just because the virus appears to be spreading again doesn't mean that many people are going to find themselves in hospital.
"It's hard to know how many people will be infected. It could be 10 per cent, it could be 30 per cent," she said, adding that the majority of infections to date have been not serious, bringing on the typical flu symptoms of headache, cough, and sore throat.
"They'll feel like a truck hit them but they'll generally recover in less than a week," she said.
Many public health officials have suggested that the second wave of swine flu would probably start much earlier than seasonal flu usually does, arriving as early as October, instead of the usual late December-early November.
The vaccine against swine flu, meanwhile, is not expected to be available to the provinces for vaccination programs until mid-November.
Most infectious disease experts are expecting that swine flu will "crowd out" other strains of the flu this fall, causing the majority of flu cases, just as it did during the southern hemisphere's winter.
Already in Mexico, reports suggest the second wave has hit there. Daily diagnoses of flu are up across the country, with 483 new cases in just one day this month alone.
With diagnoses already reaching higher levels in September than the peak of the first swine flu wave in April, Mexicans are being told to brace for an outbreak that may be larger than the one in the spring.
