Notices by Ian M. Mackay, PhD (he/him) (mackayim2022@mastodon.social)

FluA subtype A(H1N1), derived from our *last* pandemic #influenza virus, dominates.
2025=thick red dashed line/red monthly dots. The last pink dot just marks September as an incomplete month.

An Australian winter #flu thread incoming.
In the ~14 days since my last update (07OCT), detections have risen by 16,795. That's a daily rate of 1,200 (down from 1,368 in the previous update; continuing to slow).

Annual totals.
2025 is highlighted with a pink dot indicating its total is still being updated.
🥇2025🥇 is the biggest year on record, in terms of lab detections of #flu -infected people (without defining severity). These *are* sick people getting tested.

*Sidenote. That pie graph shows the number of flu cases from a specific, small sample that have been antigenically typed in the local WHO flu lab.
On-the-ground data from hospital cases pretty closely backs this distribution. But subtyping and dominance varies a lot by age

Long Covid Risk for Children Doubles After a Second Infection, Study Finds.

Children you say?

#longCOVID

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/30/health/long-covid-children.html?smid=bs-share

#Flu vaccines help prevent severe disease, whereas not getting a vaccine does nothing. #Flu kills, harms & strains your respiratory and cardiovascular systems and can impact your neurological system as well.
https://virologydownunder.com/influenza-on-the-brain/

More studies of a role for gut infection are needed.

Annual totals.
2025 is highlighted with a pink dot to indicate that its total is still being updated.
2025 is the 2nd biggest year on record, in terms of lab detections of # flu -infected people (without defining severity), behind 2024.

An expanded version of the last graph, both in the number of years included & in its horizontal stretching.
#AusFlu2025 peaked in July, but August was not a big drop, meaning still *lots* of #flu around.
Note: September not included here (n=13,595)

Quick update of Australian numbers -07SEP
FluA subtype A(H1N1), derived from our *last* pandemic #influenza virus still dominates.
2025=thick red dashed line/red monthly dots. The last pink dot just marks August as an incomplete month.
2,907 added daily over 4 days (11,628).

Vaccination rates by age group.
The total rate across all ages is the last striped bar.
Low numbers in the young.

Case detections by jurisdiction & month.
The pink dot at the end of a line indicates this ongoing month.
NSW slowdown impacted the national tally the most (the biggest "producer" & the highest rate of detections).
QLD, WA & TAS peaked in August, bucking the national trend of a July peak.

While wrong, misinformed or compromised people prefer to deny the #ClimateCrisis is here, reality shows increasing impacts from a carbon-altered atmosphere. These will increasingly strain personal & state budgets, harm food growth & health.
Aussies have had weather harm costs rising for decades.

https://youtu.be/iqfEJ1tY1yI?feature=shared

@auscandoc @Infoseepage You don't have access to a respiratory panel? Or do you mean you want to tell your patient what variant they have? Heartless I know, but their health doesn't need to know that & there is significant extra cost, time & resources required to provide full genome detail. But no specific treatment.
Careful pathology stewardship dictates its not cost effective.
I wish we could get all tests on every patient but over the years have been disabused of that because reality

@auscandoc @Infoseepage Such is life! We have bug private, high-throughput quality (in the sense of adhering to our national quality standards for pathology labs) commercial labs here that GPs sends stuff to via local collection sites. Is that not the case in Canada?

@Infoseepage @blackqueeriroh @auscandoc
You also have to look at this in terms of value for the money *provided*. Yes, an unlimited budget would be great.
I'd like to see that used for much more housing, poverty, mental health services, reducing alcoholism and domestic violence support, well before unnecessary pathology testing.

Instead, many high-income countries are..

@Infoseepage @blackqueeriroh @auscandoc
And as a sidenote, when we introduced RATs, we severely undermined the quality and value of our results. We didn't just introduce "choice" - we empowered diagnostic failure.
But we learned that quite a lot of people were happy with a poorly sensitive, poor quality, poorly controlled and unreported result. They didn't want to actually know the correct result, just *a* result.

@Infoseepage @blackqueeriroh @auscandoc
...We still require special investigations when the few frontline tests are negative for a case of special interest to a Doctor. You may not grasp how little laboratory testing regimes are standardised or systematic.

@Infoseepage @blackqueeriroh @auscandoc
Few things.
🔴Good luck getting that funded.
🔴MANY places -not just CHN, NLD & DEN- use PCR screening of sick people as an ongoing tool. Its the standard.
🔴POCT Dx, 'PCR screening' and WGS are three distinct items.
🔴I agree-more & better tetsing would be fantastic. But I'm realistic. And it shodulnt be limited to H5 or future threats that may never eventuate. We haven't yet got that in place for current viruses..

@Infoseepage @blackqueeriroh @auscandoc What makes you think sequencing efforts are scattershot?
Sequencing a portion of positives is all that's needed to monitor variant emergence. That detail isn't needed for patient management, is slow, costly and resource intensive. That's being done worldwide at the moment anyway. Not every country, but enough to see emerging variants. Not that we react to new variants other than for vaccine updates.

@Infoseepage @auscandoc Excessive repetition. Scaling back was smart. We're seeing what we need.