😷Respiratory virus data in these tweets are from Sullivan Nicolaides Pathology (SNP) lab weekly report.
😷They service #Queensland, northern New South Wales and wider Darwin area and Alice Springs
•Reports: snp.com.au/clinicians/res…
•SNP locations:snp.com.au/our-locations/
😷A reminder that whatever respiratory signs & symptoms bring a patient in for a test/Doctor's visit - many very different respiratory viruses can cause that disease. Only a good pathology laboratory test has a hope of identifying a cause.
🧬Detailed public-facing PCR data from a private lab in Queensland, Australia (thankyou🙏) showing #Flu % positivity around 6%↔ (about 1 in 16 samples tested are FluA or FluB positive).
•FluB showing its spiky face but FluA dominating
•RSV and rhinovirus number⬆
Also, #Flu numbers in New South Wales (NSW), Australia (with 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗲𝘀𝘁 reports) to week ending 04MAR2023.
😷Gradual rise in #flu daily detections. Looks like we're in the foothill of the 2023 season (there was a bit of a false start very early in Jan that dipped away).
Thanks, as always, to @NSWhealth
for always reliably producing Australia's best set of data on respiratory viruses and keeping your community informed about their illnesses.
Graphs and data from: health.nsw.gov.au/Infectious/cov…
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"Equatorial Guinea said on Wednesday that it had registered the "unusual epidemiological situation" over the past weeks in Kie-Ntem province's Nsok Nsomo district that caused nine deaths in two adjacent communities over a short period."
🔅What follows is not to minimise serious impact of COVID-19. Because many things are true at once. 🔅
Pre-pandemic, excess deaths from heart & other issues were associated with respiratory virus seasons-Flu, RSV, MPV etc.
Cleaned air & 😷 will also reduce risk of those harms
We've never succeeded in removing those harms or, in many nations, made serious non-vax efforts to reduce the risks, although a well matched flu vaccine likely helps them for flu.
But now SARS-CoV-2 has added more harms to the pile.
We have plenty of evidence of airborne spread for all respiratory viruses. Including SARS-CoV-2. We have plenty of evidence of how to interfere with that without needing to lockdown.
Yes, even masks (despite some poorly thought out studies) have a role.
We are all playing Covid roulette. Without clean air, the next infection could permanently disable you.
-a pretty full summary of the worst of it all. 1/7 theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
"Do we really mean to sit and watch as this infection encroaches on our freedom to be well, brutal winter after brutal winter?"
🦠Of course "No", but I can't square that with the fact that in my lifetime, there's been no action but a vaccine for the same question about influenza
Because we prove again & again that we have short memories. We'd rather fight than learn/progress.
We're easily distracted & don't care about the death of our elderly (we do seem to care about neonate & infant deaths)
Not very hard to see why we *must* have leadership.
3/7
Hey didja hear the buzz about the latest recombinant MPV variants reported from China?
No. You probably didn't. And why would you have?
We mostly ignore that stuff & the contribution this & other viruses continually make to our death, harm & hospitalisation baselines.
And while an arbitrary human naming system says all variations are called 'MPV' (human metapneumovirus; not current name btw), there are in fact distinct lineages & variants & constant evolution & recombination.
The Chinese study is just one I recently saw, of many out there.
At some point the viral cause of COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, will also just become "SARS-CoV-2".
Perhaps the next round of reviews could help if they clarify who still dies, who doesn't, takes a bigger picture view & delve into how other harms have changed after vaccination & infection
Study on Measles Transmission in China Has Implications for Controlling Epidemic Worldwide shar.es/aflJn9 via @Columbiamsph
of the slice of time over which diseaseX is being observed. Let's use China & measles as an example. journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/a…
🔴"we found that large industrial cities in China with large migrant populations supported 𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗺𝗶𝗰 measles transmission during 2005–2014"
2/x
But also...
🔴"In China, where countrywide vaccination coverage for the last decade has been above 95% (the threshold for measles elimination), measles continues to cause large 𝗲𝗽𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗺𝗶𝗰𝘀"
The disease can enter or leave either state depending on conditions..
3/x
Frikkin astounds and annoys me that we continue to focus only on the hyper detailed genetic variation of SARS-CoV-2, yet give none of that prime time attention to Flu virus or RSV, MPV & others driving hospitalisations around the world. Where's the genotyping & narration?
We should have the capacity to do this, at a wider range of sites than prepandemic times. We have vaccines for some of these (now or soon). We have a more knowledgeable populace. Shouldn't we be *building* on genomics, not slipping back to a pre-genomic communication age?
I may not see the value of sequencing hundreds of SC2 genomes a day at one site. But I do see a point to applying the tech to other seasonal and outbreak pathogens at that site. And reportinv clearly publicly/open access, on those findings.