Hunter New England Health Infectious Disease physician and Director of HMRI’s Infection Research Program, Professor Joshua Davis says, “As long as humans encroach on habitat, eat animal products, travel globally or have anything to with bats, we are going to continue to experience pandemics.”

So how can we predict and monitor this? The answer is simple: surveillance.

Professor Davis and his team have been running a study called the Pandemic Respiratory Virus Surveillance Trial (PREVENT). This builds on the highly successful FluTracking* project and has enrolled 50 volunteers to swab themselves every week for a year and complete a survey.

“We want to improve the FluTracking platform by collecting nose swabs for virus testing, in addition to the usual symptom diaries. This will help us understand what viruses are circulating in people with and without cold or flu symptoms,” says Professor Davis.

“Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the most common causes of colds and flu-like illnesses were ‘seasonal’ coronaviruses, influenza (‘flu) virus, and rhinovirus. We don’t know what has happened to these viruses now that the COVID-19 virus is so common.” 

The swabs are then tested for 16 viruses as well as unknown viruses.

“Available tests for respiratory viruses can only test for known viruses. But people often have symptoms and test negative for all the common viruses. We plan to look harder in these situations, by doing a special research test that looks for all viruses (known or unknown). This testing is called ‘metagenomics’,” says Professor Davis

This kind of surveillance system could be scaled up nationally and globally to become an early warning system for the next pandemic.

Despite questioning around the feasibility of the study, especially relying on people to swab themselves each week and send the sample back via mail, Professor Davis says they have received over an 85% return rate so far, with all swabs containing an adequate amount of DNA/RNA to enable successful testing.

Pending further funding, Professor Davis and his team hope to establish a sustainable, scalable surveillance and early warning system that will include more participants across Australia.

*FluTracking is a surveillance system that harnesses the power of the internet and community spirit for monitoring influenza and COVID-19. Participants are sent a weekly online survey that takes less than 30 seconds to complete and asks participants to report on any presence of typical flu-like symptoms.

Over the 17 years the survey has been running in Australia, and now 5 years in New Zealand, the study has grown to 110,000 participants per week and has collected over 23.2 million surveys. Learn more about FluTracking here