What is the Australian flu?
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What does Australia’s mild flu season tell us about upcoming flu trends?
The Clare Byrne Show on Newstalk. With Aviva Insurance.
Australia's flu season is coming close to an end. So what can we learn from it here? Christine Loescher is with me, Professor of Immunology at DCU. Good morning, Christine. Good morning, Clare. So we always do this, don't we? We have a look at what happened in Australia and it gives us a good indication as to what we might expect in the coming months here.
Yeah, it's a really good indication because just as their flu season ends, ours begins. And we learned a lot from them last year. And just at the end, they had that variant of the flu that kind of caused havoc for us then last year. So I suppose the good news is that so far they've had a very mild flu season, as in nowhere near what they had the year before. So last year they had about 500,000 cases and this year they had about 150,000.
Why were Australia’s flu case numbers dramatically lower this year?
And they think that's for a couple of reasons. One is that, first of all, thankfully it's the same strain of flu that seems to be dominant in Australia this year. as what we had last year, which is the strain that arose at the end of their season, which means that the vaccine has been adjusted and is giving really good coverage against that strain of flu. That's the first thing. And the second thing is they think that because they got so many flu cases last year, they have some level of background population immunity, where if somebody got infected or got the vaccine last year, that because the strain is the same this year, there was some background level of immunity. I suppose that's the good news.
The kind of little bit of concern on the end of that is that in the last few weeks, there has been a very unusual second wave of flu, particularly in Queensland, where they might have had 20,000 cases for the whole season and now they're reporting 3,000 cases a week in the last two weeks. So something has changed and that might be because people have got their vaccine a long time ago. We know that the vaccine wanes over time and maybe just their level of immunity is a bit lower now. There's no suggestion that it's a new variant, but it is unusual. And because flu, when it's circulating and it's in very high numbers, we know flu mutates the whole time, just like COVID did. which means that the chance of a mutation arising is a little bit higher, but that doesn't mean that's going to happen.
So there's lots going on in Australia that might, A, give us a little bit of reassurance that things weren't as bad as last year, but B, a little bit of concern at the end about what might happen at the end of their season.
OK, and the other danger is that we go, oh, sure, it wasn't too bad in Australia.
How might waning immunity and a late‑season surge affect our flu risk?
I don't need to get the shot this year, which is a risk that people might be tempted to run with.
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that, you know, while we had a lot of flu cases last year, we 25,000, we certainly didn't have the flu season that Australia did. So our population immunity is likely not to be as high as theirs. So we haven't got that safety net that they potentially had this year. And then obviously we don't know what's going to happen at the end of their flu season. Japan's flu season is starting now. There's a lot of other countries that are just coming into flu season. We could also have a variant that might arise during our own flu season. So the unpredictability about flu seasons is always the concerning piece. And the most important thing that we say every year, Clare, is that The best tool we have in the box for flu is the prevention tool, and that is the vaccine.
Our very effective, longstanding, you know, has proven to be very safe and very effective for years. And that flu vaccine is going to launch now in the next couple of weeks.
Is the Irish flu vaccine this year tailored to the Australian strain?
And the message is that we need to start thinking now about flu season. I know it's still very warm this time of the year. We've had a great summer. Nobody has been thinking about the winter. But flu season will happen, will start in the coming weeks. And it will be it will it will be honest, like very, very quickly.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What does Australia’s mild flu season tell us about upcoming flu trends?
0:01–0:56
2
Why were Australia’s flu case numbers dramatically lower this year?
0:56–2:50
3
How might waning immunity and a late‑season surge affect our flu risk?
2:50–3:54
4
Is the Irish flu vaccine this year tailored to the Australian strain?
3:54–4:54
5
Why is the enhanced flu vaccine important for people over 60?
4:54–6:16
6
What are the biggest barriers to flu‑vaccine uptake in children?
6:16–7:23
7
How can school‑based vaccination programmes boost childhood flu coverage?
7:23–8:44