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.
In 2024, there was an average of 30,000 responses per week.
He hoped it had not been defunded as a cost-saving measure, as it was a low-cost system for New Zealand to participate in.
"There's just a fairly modest fee we pay to Australia just to support the operation of the system, plus I think there's some staff involved at PHF Science to keep it going, so this is one of the most cost-effective tools we've got."
Baker did not think that the FluTracking programme could be replaced.
He said it filled what had become "a big gap in our surveillance" that disappeared around Covid.
"We do have good data on people who go to hospital with severe respiratory infections. We do have some lab-based surveillance. But we're really missing this very important base of the pyramid, that is people with less severe illness who are not going to see a doctor, or even those that do go and see a doctor. We just don't have a good record of how many people are in that situation."
Baker said the decision was short-sighted, especially as it ran all year.
"Very few of our other systems do that. Most of them are concentrated in the flu season period. So it does tell us what's happening throughout the whole year."
Losing local data a blow for NZ researchers
The Australian public health doctor who created the award-winning programme, Associate Professor Craig Dalton, said it would be a blow for New Zealand researchers to lose that local data.
"We can never be sure where flu or Covid is going to arrive, it varies from year to year, so it's hard to know what kind of impact it [the end of the New Zealand programme] will have," said Dalton, a researcher and lecturer at the University of Newcastle.
It had repeatedly proved its worth in terms of charting the spread of respiratory illnesses, and even forecasting pandemics by using "health seeking behaviour".
"A surge in raw influenza data from laboratories doesn't make clear if it's due to increased disease or increased testing.
"The 2009 influenza pandemic was the first time we realised 'Wow, this is giving a really different viewpoint to what's on through laboratory testing and healthlines.
"It's all useful data, you just have to triangulate it to get that complete picture."
The surveillance network, which started in Australia in 2006, has expanded to Fiji, Hong Kong and Argentina, as well as New Zealand.
It was only since Covid-19 that FluTracking had continued year-round, Dalton said, so it was "not a disaster" for New Zealand to stop now.
"It [the Ministry of Health] has been a great partner.
"Hopefully we can start up again, we may find other partners, other funding."
