Health security

Everything you must know to fight off this winter's dreaded Aussie flu which could be heading to Britain

It’s a virus to which the elderly are particularly susceptible (similar to one that circulated in the UK in the winter of 2014/15, causing a significant number of deaths).

The strain could dominate in the UK, too — and may be here already. ‘The Southern hemisphere is an important place to monitor as it will seed and transmit its flu virus to the Northern hemisphere,’ explains Professor Robert Booy, an expert on infectious diseases at the University of Sydney and head of the clinical research team at the National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance in Australia.

...The composition of this year’s vaccine, chosen by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in March, contains strains of A and B viruses, including H3N2. But it appears to have performed poorly in Australia, possibly because the virus has mutated.

‘In a good year we would expect a general effectiveness of 50 per cent, but we don’t know if we have reached that this year,’ says Professor Allen Cheng, director of the infection prevention unit at Alfred Health at Monash University in Melbourne.