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

I mean, right now, like I said, the health risk is really at wildlife.

Here in Australia, our native wildlife are naive to this kind of virus.

It's not been here.

So there are fears that it can be actually quite devastating to our native populations, black swans in particular.

The fact that it's been found in Western Australia could be bad news for the old black swans.

For poultry farmers, obviously, this is a really, really big concern.

Victorian farms had to cull millions and millions of chickens really recently because of a different strain of bird flu.

There are vaccines for chickens that can help protect them from, you know, let's repeat the refrain, it won't stop you from getting the disease, but it will help curb severe disease and death.

In terms of human vaccinations, there is potential to really quickly ramp up a vaccine against H5N1 should it become a pandemic.

So recently I went to CSL Securus, which is a really big manufacturer of seasonal flu vaccines, but they also have the manufacturing facilities to switch to a pandemic flu vaccine if they need to.

So they actually have a few of these H5N1 viruses stored away in a virus library, ready to go, ready to pull the trigger once the World Health Organisation says that there is a pandemic.

That's their signal to switch from making seasonal flu vaccines to pandemic flu vaccines.

The cold chain, that kind of thing.

And we haven't seen this human-to-human spread yet.

So CSL Securus say that they can manufacture 150 million doses of pandemic vaccine within around four to six months.

So they can really get things cranking really quickly.

And before...

They used to make the flu vaccine in eggs, chicken eggs.

But what if there's an avian flu outbreak and there are no eggs to manufacture vaccines in?

The egg shelves were empty.

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