Swine Flu: Australia Our Future?

Infectious disease specialists often look to the Southern Hemisphere to get a rough gauge on how bad the flu will be here in the Northern Hemisphere. That's because they, as you'd expect, have flu season in their winter and they are into their spring season.

So how did their flu season turn out? After all, they had to face the full impact of this novel H1N1/swine flu. They had a pretty average flu season. Influenza-like illness (ILI, the catch-all name for flu and everything like it) is: "At a national level, rates are below levels seen at the same time in 2007 and 2008."

That's good news for us by indicating that our flu season may not be bad.

Here's Report No. 22 from the Australian Government Department of Health and Ageing.