Influenza B virus is spreading through Top End

FIFTEEN people in the Top End are being diagnosed with influenza B a week, just months after a horror outbreak of the A strain of the virus

FIFTEEN people in the Top End are being diagnosed with influenza B a week, just months after a horror outbreak of the A strain of the virus.

An intense 2018 flu season saw 254 people hospitalised in the Territory in December.

There were 680 cases reported that month.

Centre for Disease Control head of disease surveillance Dr Peter Markey described the December outbreak as “weird”.

Numbers have dropped off significantly since then and infections have shifted to the B strain. “It’s more than no flu but it’s not a big flu season,” Dr Markey said.

In Queensland, human trials are set to begin which will test an experimental broad-spectrum flu vaccine, designed to protect against all strains of the highly contagious virus.

If the vaccine proves effective, it could spell the end of annual flu vaccinations.

University of the Sunshine Coast Clinical Trials director Lucas Litewka said 2200 people were being recruited across Australia to test the universal flu vaccine, based on a compound developed by Oxford University’s Jenner Institute.

Mr Litewka said researchers hoped the new jab would one day allow people to be vaccinated much less frequently.

“The hope is that this will allow people to get vaccinated against the flu once every 10 years or even less frequently,” he said.

Mr Litewka said the experimental broad-spectrum vaccine worked by boosting the body’s T cells, a type of immune cell. Conventional flu vaccines targeted specific strains of the virus.

The T cells are activated to fight the virus from the inside, rather than to target proteins on the outside of cells, which change as the flu mutates.

“The theory is that it doesn’t matter what the flu strain is, if you’re targeting the internal proteins, which are the same across all of the strains, you’ll eliminate the influenza before it spreads,” Mr Litewka explains.

He said participants in the trial will receive the annual flu shot before either being given the experimental universal flu jab, or a placebo.

Because the annual flu vaccine only contains three or four of the key strains circulating in a population, researchers will test the effectiveness of the experimental jab by comparing it to the placebo.