Nov. 19 (Bloomberg) — Swine flu may create a shortage of intensive-care unit beds for U.K. children, leaving medical professionals struggling to cope in the pandemic, according to a report in today’s Archives of Disease in Childhood.

Doctors at Cambridge University and Addenbrooke’s Hospital estimated that 3.8 percent of under-15s hospitalized with swine flu in the U.K. will require intensive care. If just 2 percent of children who contract the illness require hospitalization, almost all of the U.K.’s available 303 pediatric ICU beds in 25 centers will be occupied, according to the findings. If 1 percent is hospitalized, half of the existing capacity will be filled, the researchers said.

“It appears inevitable that pediatric ICUs will experience significant additional pressure this winter from admissions due to the pandemic,” the authors, led by Ari Ercole of the Cambridge University Department of Anaesthesia, wrote in the journal.

Swine flu has killed 182 people in the U.K., England’s Chief Medical Officer Liam Donaldson said on Nov. 12. People younger than 44 years account for 60 percent of the deaths and children have been especially hard hit, he said. Children under 15 years accounted for 21 percent of the deaths.

The shortages may be more acute in some regions because the provision of ICU beds varies around the country, the researchers wrote. Hospitals in London, Yorkshire and the Humber and the Northeast are well equipped with pediatric ICU beds, while those in Wales, the southeast coast and east of England are not as well served, according to the report.

Pandemic

“Pediatric retrieval services may be heavily utilized to move children to centres where capacity exists,” the authors wrote.

The doctors used software developed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to model demand for pediatric ICU beds during the pandemic.

They assumed that 30 percent of the U.K. population would be sickened, based on planning recommendations from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. The researchers said their assumption was “conservative” compared with data that showed infection rates of up to 61 percent in children in Mexico, where the virus originated in April.

They also assumed that hospitalized children would require intensive-care treatment for five days and that the pandemic would last 12 weeks.

The U.K.’s pediatric intensive-care beds can be “substantially increased” if necessary, Department of Health spokeswoman Joni Hollis said in an e-mailed statement.

To contact the reporter responsible for this story: Andrea Gerlin in London at agerlin@bloomberg.net