Southern Hemisphere Influenza and Vaccine Effectiveness Research and Surveillance

Huang, Qiu Sue; Turner, Nikki; Baker, Michael G; Williamson, Deborah A; Wong, Conroy; Webby, Richard; Widdowson, Marc-Alain

To more fully understand the epidemiology of influenza, these two platforms will be leveraged for other studies: (a) sero-epidemiological study: To obtain rates of mild influenza illness that do not trigger GP visits as well as symptomatic/asymptomatic infections, the enrolled patients in those sentinel general practices will be used to randomly select a cohort of persons (stratified by age and ethnicity) and followed through one influenza season. The serologic surveys will measure preand post-season antibodies to circulating influenza strains using relevant vaccine reference strains as antigens; (b) immunology study: A subset of samples from severe, moderate influenza cases, related risk groups and individuals with serologically defined influenza infection are selected for the study of humoral and cellular immune responses ( Figure 3) ; and (c) remaining studies: The combined laboratory testing results and metadata collected from these platforms are used to study vaccine effectiveness, interaction between respiratory pathogens, respiratory mortality, risk factors and economic burden and vaccine cost-effectiveness. Our innovative study design interconnecting multiple objectives, in addition to exploiting NZ's unique healthcare structure, will maximize efficiency and study power. The two surveillance platforms provided specimens and data to serve the nine objectives of SHIVERS. Figure 5 shows how each of the objectives is linked to each other and maps data and specimen flows between them.