Indian envoy warns of 'big red line,' days after charges laid in Nijjar case
India's envoy to Canada insists relations between the two countries are positive overall, despite what he describes as 'a lot of noise.'
Infectious disease experts are already hard at work preparing for the 2021 flu season, vaccines are in development and experts are keeping an eye on trends in the Southern Hemisphere as they enter their winter months.
The World Health Organization (WHO) made recommendations for the annual influenza vaccine in February 2021, based on the data collected from the previous year. The WHO uses the previous flu season’s data to identify trends in which flu strains took hold, and to make recommendations for which strains would be best suited in the annual flu vaccine. The WHO has conducted global influenza surveillance since 1952.
“Although the flu season cases were very low last season, the WHO has a global surveillance program, they're still monitoring what strains they predict will be dominant in the next flu season,” Yan Zhou, senior scientist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan, told CTVNews.ca in a phone interview on Wednesday.
Flu seasons in 2020 were mild across the globe. In Canada a start to the season couldn’t even be declared due to so few cases, Australia reported just 36 deaths and the U.S. reported 600 which was down from 22,000 the year before. Despite the lack of cases to predict from, the WHO and experts know that there are two main influenza types that spread during the annual cold weather months. Zhou says there is always influenza A, such as H1N1, and influenza B.
“The flu vaccine is comprised of at least three strains: So, H1N1, H3N2 and then a B strain.”
The WHO recommends a quadrivalent vaccine, a vaccine containing four strains, for the Northern Hemisphere’s 2021 flu season. Two strains will be influenza A strains and two will be influenza B strains.
“Most cases [last] season, influenza B was dominant,” said Zhou.
The WHO recommends that the vaccine contain H1N1 and H3N2 for influenza A strains and Yamagata lineage and Victoria lineage for the B influenza strains. And while the WHO may be working off of less data than usual, Zhou isn’t too concerned about the upcoming flu season.
“Not too worried about, to predict, the flu season. There will always be A and B and we already know from the last year’s cases, there are more influenza B infections,” she said.
Much like with the COVID-19 vaccine, some protection is better than no protection, so even if the WHO’s recommended strains aren’t spot-on, they should still provide a barrier against severe illness.
“The provincial vaccine programs over the course of the last decade or so has significantly reduced hospitalizations and deaths, even in years where the flu shot ‘did not match very well,’” Craig Jenne, infectious disease researcher and Canada Research Chair at the University of Calgary told CTVNews.ca in a phone interview on Wednesday.
So, while predicting this year’s flu season trends based on a smaller dataset from 2020 may be difficult, it doesn’t necessarily spell out a disastrous flu season to come, he added. In previous years, the flu has mutated differently than expected resulting in an imperfect vaccine.
“Even in those situations where we have a bad guess or the virus dodged it and mutated further, although the flu shot doesn't necessarily stop you from getting infected as well, it still reduces hospitalizations, by some estimates of up to tenfold,” said Jenne.
“It's still protective so a mismatched flu shot might not stop you from getting the sore throat and other effects, but it prevents people from getting the life-threatening serious influenza illness.”
Like Zhou, he’s not too worried about the upcoming flu season.
“It's not overly worrisome. I'll get my flu shot again, and then basically have no elevated concerns over any other flu season,” he said.
If last year’s limited flu season can teach us anything, it’s that the COVID-19 measures in place work to slow the spread of respiratory viruses.
“This idea of washing our hands and staying away from other people was apparently quite effective worldwide,” he said. “I think the larger contribution was also somewhat limited travel so as with pretty much any virus it doesn’t move on it’s own.”
India's envoy to Canada insists relations between the two countries are positive overall, despite what he describes as 'a lot of noise.'
With Donald Trump sitting just feet away, Stormy Daniels testified Tuesday at the former president's hush money trial about a sexual encounter the porn actor says they had in 2006 that resulted in her being paid to keep silent during the presidential race 10 years later.
The U.S. paused a shipment of bombs to Israel last week over concerns that Israel was approaching a decision on launching a full-scale assault on the southern Gaza city of Rafah against the wishes of the U.S.
Footage from dozens of security cameras in the area of Drake’s Bridle Path mansion could be the key to identifying the suspect responsible for shooting and seriously injuring a security guard outside the rapper’s sprawling home early Tuesday morning, a former Toronto homicide detective says.
A chicken farmer near Mattawa made an 'eggstraordinary' find Friday morning when she discovered one of her hens laid an egg close to three times the size of an average large chicken egg.
Susan Buckner, best known for playing peppy Rydell High School cheerleader Patty Simcox in the 1978 classic movie musical 'Grease,' has died. She was 72.
Accused killer Jeremy Skibicki could have a challenging time convincing a judge that he is not criminally responsible for the deaths of four Indigenous women, a legal analyst says.
A Calgary bylaw requiring businesses to charge a minimum bag fee and only provide single-use items when requested has officially been tossed.
Two Nova Scotia men are dead after a boat they were travelling in sank in the Annapolis River in Granville Centre, N.S., on Monday.
An Ontario man says he paid more than $7,700 for a luxury villa he found on a popular travel website -- but the listing was fake.
Whether passionate about Poirot or hungry for Holmes, Winnipeg mystery obsessives have had a local haunt for over 30 years in which to search out their latest page-turners.
Eighty-two-year-old Susan Neufeldt and 90-year-old Ulrich Richter are no spring chickens, but their love blossomed over the weekend with their wedding at Pine View Manor just outside of Rosthern.
Alberta Ballet's double-bill production of 'Der Wolf' and 'The Rite of Spring' marks not only its final show of the season, but the last production for twin sisters Alexandra and Jennifer Gibson.
A mother goose and her goslings caused a bit of a traffic jam on a busy stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway near Vancouver Saturday.
A British Columbia mayor has been censured by city council – stripping him of his travel and lobbying budgets and removing him from city committees – for allegedly distributing a book that questions the history of Indigenous residential schools in Canada.
Three men in Quebec from the same family have fathered more than 600 children.
A group of SaskPower workers recently received special recognition at the legislature – for their efforts in repairing one of Saskatchewan's largest power plants after it was knocked offline for months following a serious flood last summer.
A police officer on Montreal's South Shore anonymously donated a kidney that wound up drastically changing the life of a schoolteacher living on dialysis.