Townsville disease outbreaks: Influenza, Covid, whooping cough, RSV strike region
A perfect storm of four potentially debilitating – but preventable – respiratory illnesses is impacting North Queensland.
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A perfect storm of four potentially debilitating – but preventable – respiratory illnesses is impacting North Queensland.
Dr Steven Donohue, the director Townsville Public Health Unit, said on Monday that the region had been inundated with higher than average numbers of laboratory-confirmed cases of influenza, as well as Covid, Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) and whooping cough, also known as pertussis.
“It’s a quadruple whammy and what people need to realise is that we can do a lot with immunisations to protect people,” he said.
“There is certainly an outbreak, not unprecedented outbreak numbers, but it’s quite serious.”
Queensland Health data shows that so far this year there have been 1735 cases of influenza, well above the year-to-date mean of 660 from 2019-2023, 1478 cases of Covid, 1142 cases of RSV and 14 of pertussis.
“We are certainly well into the annual flu outbreak and certainly for this time of year it seems to be higher than in the most recent years,” Dr Donohue said, adding that the official statistics were likely “the tip of the iceberg” in terms of the total number of cases.
He said the outbreaks of all four notifiable conditions “all at once” had compounded issues.
“That’s why people are getting sick and it’s a particular risk for infants and babies, and on the other end of the spectrum with Covid with elderly people.”
Dr Donohue said vaccines were available for all of the diseases.
“The message really has to be that people really need to take advantage of those immunisations,” he said.
“Everybody aged over six months should be having the flu vaccine every year and Covid, particularly the elderly, should be having an annual booster, those aged over 65.”
He also recommended booster shots for whooping cough.
“Whooping cough of course is something you get vaccinated for as a baby because it is so harmful for very young children (but) the vaccine doesn’t stop it circulating in the older age groups … and that’s why booster vaccines for whooping cough … are really important.”
Dr Donohue said it was important that parents ensure their newborn or young children were protected against RSV, which was particularly dangerous for newborns.
“It’s been the main cause of hospitalisation in children for some years now so it’s fantastic that we can now offer newborns an antibody immunisation product to prevent that first nasty infection.”
He said the “remarkable” new product was available to all newborns, back-dated to all children born from February.
“It’s going to make a huge difference to the rate of severe respiratory diseases in infants.”
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Originally published as Townsville disease outbreaks: Influenza, Covid, whooping cough, RSV strike region
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