Panic Merchant of the Day

A leading epidemiologist says a plan to ditch an online tool tracking respiratory illness is short-sighted, and will leave a big gap in surveillance.

The Ministry of Health is not renewing its contract for the FluTracking tool, as it looks to cut costs.

FluTracking New Zealand surveyed about 40,000 people year-round, who were asked weekly whether they had any flu-like symptoms, such as fever, cough or sore throat, along with their testing and vaccination status.

It kept track of illnesses such as Influenza, Covid-19 and RSV and more than 142,000 people had participated in New Zealand since May 2018.

FluTracking was administered in Australia and cost the ministry about $57,000 a year.

But the ministry said it needed to find savings, and would instead use other surveillance tools, such as Healthline data, to track respiratory illness in New Zealand.

“We need to ensure good value for investment in public health and seek efficiencies where they do not impact service delivery,” said a spokesperson.

It said FluTracking had been one of the data inputs into the New Zealand Respiratory Illness Dashboard maintained by PHF Science. It said it sat alongside other respiratory illness surveillance activities, including at GP clinics, hospitals and through calls to Healthline.

Epidemiologist Michael Baker, who is also a professor in the Department of Public Health at the University of Otago, told RNZ he was disappointed.

He said it was the only system across all of Australia’s six states and New Zealand, which enabled both countries to compare.

It was also the only system to provide information on people who had not seen a doctor or been admitted to hospital.

“It’s a really important sector of the population that we don’t have data on otherwise,” Baker said.

RNZ