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

The platforms established here are relevant not only for New Zealand policy, but also for the region and the world. It will provide robust systematic virologic, epidemiologic and vaccine effectiveness data on circulating pandemic or seasonal influenza viruses at a time when circulation in the Northern Hemisphere is low. This could provide valuable information on all emergent respiratory pathogens that have some winter seasonality. Moreover, the data elements on a range of disease severities collected in the same population at the same time will generate epidemiologic parameters that maybe broadly generalizable and translatable to similar developed, southern and northern temperate countries worldwide. This will help enormously to better understand more basic surveillance data and to extrapolate those data in models to plan and predict influenza behaviour, generate burden estimates, model the impact of seasonal influenza vaccination to support more global use and better prepare for the next pandemic.