Sydney - A 35-year-old Australian man has died of respiratory failure in a Melbourne hospital after testing positive for swine flu, state health authorities in Victoria said Tuesday.

Rosemary Lester, Victoria's acting chief medical officer, stressed that the patient had underlying health problems when he was admitted Friday.

"He was intubated and ventilated to assist his breathing and transferred to the intensive care unit at Maroondah Hospital the same day," she said.

He died Saturday and subsequent testing showed that he had swine flu.

He is the second man in Australia to die after contracting swine flu. On Friday, a 26-year-old Aboriginal man died after being diagnosed with swine flu. He too had serious underlying health problems.

"It's important to remember that in the vast majority of cases, human swine flu is a mild illness which many people recover from without any medical treatment," Lester said.

There have been around 2,000 cases of swine flu in Australia, more than half of them in and around Melbourne. (dpa)