Influenza now appears to be a year-round disease, and the government should provide publicly funded booster influenza vaccines for people aged 65 or older to achieve longer-term protection, an expert recommended on Wednesday.
Huang Li-min (黃立民), an attending physician specializing in pediatric infectious diseases at National Taiwan University Hospital, told a news conference that the flu epidemic, the first summer flu outbreak in the nation in seven years, has been “very severe.”
As of Friday last week, the nation had recorded 1,231 influenza cases with severe complications, Huang said, showing that the flu epidemic was not over and that it had become a year-round phenomenon.
Photo: CNA
Statistics compiled by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) showed that flu numbers were up, with the number of visits to outpatient and emergency care clinics by people with flu-like symptoms in the first 32 weeks of this year up 70 percent from the same period last year.
FULL-YEAR PROTECTION
Given those trends, Huang said Taiwan should follow advanced countries in offering adjuvanted (immune-response enhanced), high-dose and genetically recombinant flu vaccines as the standard publicly funded vaccine for people aged 65 or older to protect them for a full year.
Traditional flu vaccines provide protection for only six months.
Huang said the heightened flu issues are related to what he described as an “immunity debt” caused by reduced exposure to immune stimulation due to preventive measures during the COVID-19 pandemic that reduced people’s active and passive immunity.
This “immunity debt” effect might not be paid off until the end of next year, he added.
In the past, the incidence of influenza infection typically began to increase in autumn and peaked in the winter months, but with global warming the flu now occurs year-round, he said.
When the difference in temperature between winter and summer is significant enough, a large number of people get infected in winter, and people infected with the virus develop an immune response that makes it less likely they would be infected with the flu in the summer.
However, if the winter months are not cold enough, fewer people are affected during that time of the year and the flu would be spread over all four seasons, he said.
TRAVEL EFFECT
At the same time, a surge in travel over the past two years since COVID-19 travel restrictions were lifted has helped spread flu viruses around the world and given them more of a year-round presence, he said.
As such, providing protection for a full year is important and only the more advanced vaccines could achieve that, he said.
CDC Deputy Director-General and spokesman Philip Lo (羅一鈞) told Central News Agency that the government had already completed its purchasing process for publicly funded flu vaccines this year.
Asked about giving the booster flu vaccines to those 65 or older, Lo said the issue has been handed over to the Center for Drug Examination to do a cost-benefit analysis of the newer vaccines.
The proposal could be discussed by an expert committee in the spring of next year, he said.
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