Virology Down Under

A few quick graphs show that Australia’s flu season is active now; it’s later than it used to be, just after the pandemic’s peak, and is straying into early Spring like it used to.

Reporting can produce stories without raising anxiety levels within a community.

There are a few concerning media stories of empty offices and schools in New Zealand due to respiratory illnesses – coughs and colds and “the flu”.

Seasonal influenza viruses (as shown in the image below) drive epidemics that rely on both year-round circulation in the tropics and air travel, using giant conveyor belts of virus distribution, namely China and Southeast Asia, to disperse worldwide.

Remember when we all died from the pandemic that started on a cruise ship, caused by a passenger acquiring and spreading Orthohantavirus andesense?

Yep.

Australia’s Minister for Agriculture has notified Australians that overnight laboratory testing confirmed the presence of A/H5N1 in one sick bird and an H5 virus in another, both found in the same region of Western Australia.

Lock up the chooks!

The COVID-19 pandemic introduced a brand-new respiratory virus, SARS-CoV-2.

There’s so much more to these four words than is attributed to them, so I thought I’d better write that down instead of leaving it in my head.

A recent paper entitled “Diagnostic Value and Outcomes of Systematic SARS-CoV-2 Screening in Asymptomatic Patients” highlights the need for innovative contextual actions in response to positive PCR results during exceptional times of novel pathogen spread.

A few things about poliomyelitis (‘polio’) and poliovirus, the enterovirus that causes this disease.

Inspired by an online conversation and the hard work of others, I set off to examine age groupings among Australians confirmed as COVID-19 cases, based on testing using a quality-laboratory method, from 2020 to April 2026.

Data from a UK healthcare worker cohort published in 2024 examined how signs and symptoms of COVID-19 changed after 1, 2, or 3 SARS-CoV-2 lab-confirmed infections.

In the first year of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, data were assembled that defined how the virus spread among us, who, at the time, had never been infected.