Belinda Smith

speaker

2,583 appearances 26 recordings 4 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 6d ago

Belinda Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 26 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 6.

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Health Report · Bird flu has reached Australia. Now what? · 22 Jun 2026 podcast

It's really to wildlife.

This disease has been absolutely catastrophic to birds around the world, mammals as well in other cases.

So when we're talking about mortality, the risk is way higher for birds and chickens and things like that than for people.

That's right.

Exactly right.

Yes.

So what do we know about this?

I guess most of the information we have comes from the U.S.,

where we saw a spread from dairy cows to workers that worked at these dairy farms.

And it seems like it's spread by aerosol and infected milk, because there's lots of the virus in the milk that's produced by these cows.

I'll be very clear, there's been no human-to-human transmission that we know of.

So there's been roughly 1,000 reported cases of human H5N1 infection from around 2003 to earlier this year.

So not a whole lot, but of those, about 480 were fatal.

So what happens if someone has H5N1 influenza?

Is it treated any differently to your standard seasonal flu?

Absolutely.

I mean, epidemiologists, experts in public health, they've been preparing for an influenza pandemic.

When COVID hit, it sort of almost came as a surprise to a lot of people because it's a coronavirus and not an influenza virus, which is what everyone was like, you know, ready for.

So we've been ready for a flu pandemic for quite a while.

Something that really struck me about this H5N1 virus is it's been around for quite a long time.

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