Australian parents have been warned not to hold "swine flu parties" by medical experts.
The warning comes after reports in the UK that some parents think exposing their children to the virus will boost immunity.
Mothers in the United Kingdom have been discussing so-called swine flu parties on online forum mumsnet.com.
The hope is that exposing youngsters to the H1N1 swine flu virus in the northern hemisphere summer will help protect them from more virulent strains that may circulate in winter, in the same way some parents let their children contract the once-only chicken pox virus while they're young.
Authorities in Britain urged against such an approach to swine flu, which killed a six-year-old girl in Birmingham and is being investigated as the cause of death in a three-year-old Australian boy.
Public health experts in Australia say not enough is known about the virus and deliberately infecting children is underestimating its possible effects.
"It would be foolhardy to think it's just a bit of a snuffle and let's get it over with," Professor Peter McIntyre, from the National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance, said.
"It's really presuming that [swine flu] is a bit of a nothing thing and you might as well have it now than have it later but we don't know that that's the case.
"There'll be a lot of kids out there that get no symptoms and won't even know they'll have it, but you don't know if you're going to the unlucky one that does get the severe infection.
"How would you feel if you'd actually sought out something and had a bad outcome, as opposed to it having nothing to do with your deliberate action?"
AMA NSW president Brian Morton said parents could not know whether their children or other children were at higher risk of developing complications.
"You might send your child along [to a swine flu party], they get it, they go back to school and they infect someone who's vulnerable, with asthma for example," Dr Morton said.
"You'd never forgive yourself for deliberately increasing the risk of a vulnerable child dying from it."
Nine Australians, including one child, have so far died after contracting swine flu.
Professor McIntyre's co-director at the National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance, Robert Booy, today predicted double the number of children would die from swine flu as from regular influenza.
Professor Booy said the number would be small - about 10 or 12 each year - but twice as high as the three to six who die each year from seasonal flu.
"It (death from swine flu) can occur in a healthy child although most of them we believe will occur in a child with a problem, say a chronic heart problem, long-standing lung, kidney, liver (problems) or diabetes," Professor Booy told ABC radio.
"The likelihood is with this virus we'll see more of the small number of severe (cases) than we do normally."
Dr Morton said deliberate exposure among children could dramatically increase the disease's spread and was a particularly bad idea now.
"We're in winter and it's exposing children to a much higher risk than in the UK because we have seasonal flu around as well," he said.
"The risk of complications during winter of even mild swine flu is much greater."
smh.com.au 
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