Ireland braces for 1 million cases of swine flu

Man clings to life in Dublin hospital as Ireland prepares for fall flu outbreaks

This would stretch the country's medical resources to its limit.

McConkley says the high figures show there is little immunity to the flu because, he says,  it is a new strand and is highly contagious.

"Most people appear to not be immune to the virus,”  said McConkey, “The second point is that this influenza, while it is not particularly severe in many cases, does appear to be quite infectious.”

McConkey admits that experts do not how the H1N1 pandemic strain formed and described it as "effectively a hodgepodge of different viruses."

But McConkey had some encouraging news for Ireland. He said that the number of cases in Ireland was actually far lower per head of population in comparison to the U.S. and Britain (the British government has itself forecast that there could be as many as 100,000 new cases per day in the coming weeks and 20-30 percent of the population there could also come down with swine flu.

“What we can say with some degree of certainty is that seasonal influenza is much more common in Ireland circulates from October to March and it doesn’t really circulate in June July and August, it disappears and goes elsewhere," he said.

“People’s mixing patterns are different in different in wintertime than in summertime, there are a lot more people coming together in groups in schools in winter activities, whereas in summer people go off on holidays,” he said.

“It may also be the weather; the weather is colder and there is a higher humidity, there are other climactic factors that may influence the transmission as well the social mixing patterns, but I believe it is really fair to say that we don’t know with any degree of confidence which exact factors it is contribute to the higher degree of the spread of flu in wintertime.”

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Nster.com