Parents of young children should not be unduly alarmed following the death of a Victorian three-year-old boy with swine flu, federal Health Minister Nicola Roxon says.
Ms Roxon said yesterday swine flu remained mild for the majority of people and they would recover without medical intervention.
The boy died in his Doveton home in Melbourne's southeast on June 26 but his death was only announced on Wednesday. He is the first child with swine flu to die in Australia.
So far 10 people in Australia seven from Victoria have died while suffering from swine flu.
Ms Roxon refused to say if the toddler had underlying medical issues, saying the case was now in the hands of police and the coroner.
New Zealand's capital Wellington is threatening to surpass Melbourne as the swine flu capital of Australasia, an infectious diseases expert says.
Tim Blackmore, a specialist at Wellington Hospital, said while case numbers were higher in Australia, a snapshot in time showed New Zealand was struggling with relatively higher numbers of severe cases of A(H1N1) influenza.
''Melbourne is the swine flu capital of Australia but if you compare hospitalisations for the whole state of Victoria, we're ahead in our comparatively tiny city,'' he said.
Victoria, a state of 5 million, had 18 inpatients last Friday, the same as the Wellington region with just 400,000 residents, and the Kiwi figures had been climbing fast. Dr Blackmore said New Zealand was at an earlier stage in the epidemic's cycle.
About 30 people were in hospital in the Wellington region yesterday, one in a critical condition.
The country hardest hit by the virus in the southern hemisphere has been Argentina which yesterday reported 17 more swine flu deaths, bringing the total to at least 43. Health Minister Juan Manzur said that ''between 43 and 44 deaths'' linked to the virus had been confirmed, a significant jump from the 26 that had been reported by the ministry last Friday.
Argentina has now surpassed Canada as the country with the third highest swine flu death toll, following the United States with 127 deaths reported and Mexico, where the epidemic was first discovered earlier this year, with 116 deaths.
The epidemic in Argentina is noteworthy because of its apparent high mortality rate compared with other countries.
With 1587 confirmed cases and 43 deaths, one in every 37 confirmed cases 2.71 per cent in Argentina has been fatal.
In Mexico, where the epidemic was discovered, 116 people have died out of a total 8613 confirmed cases, a mortality rate of 1.35 per cent, about half as high.
By contrast, the United States has 127 confirmed deaths out of 27,717 cases, a mortality rate of 0.46 per cent for known cases, and the death rate could be far lower as US health officials believe 1million Americans have contracted swine flu. AAP