KUALA LUMPUR: While there is no upward trend of influenza cases in Malaysia, data from the World Health Organization (WHO) shows that flu cases spiked in countries in the Western Pacific region at the beginning of 2025.
In the first epidemiology week this year, the positive rate for tested influenza samples was 25.45%, followed by 26.2% in the following week, which is an increase of 2.97%.
In the third epidemiology week, the positive rate dropped to 24.51% and then to 22.69% in the subsequent week.
There are 37 countries in WHO’s Western Pacific region.
Among them are Australia, Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, South Korea, Singapore and Vietnam.
Flu cases also appeared to be at or near its highest level in at least 15 years in the United States, according to the Center For Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in its weekly flu surveillance report last Friday.
The CDC said there have been at least 24 million cases, 310,000 hospitalisations and 13,000 deaths from flu for the week ending Feb 1.
According to the report, 7.8% of patient visits to outpatient facilities that week were for influenza-like illnesses.
It recorded a steady trend over the past two weeks, from 7% in the week ending Jan 25 and 5.8% in the week prior to that.
Meanwhile, data published on Jan 31 by Japan’s National Institute of Infectious Diseases showed about 9.5 million cases of seasonal flu were recorded in Japan from Sept 2 last year to Jan 26 this year.
Between Dec 23-29, the final week of 2024, over 317,000 cases were reported across 5,000 designated medical institutions.
This equates to an average of 63.4 patients per facility, which is more than double the warning threshold of 30.
Concerns on the influenza and demand for flu vaccines have spiked following news of the death of Taiwanese actress Barbie Hsu, 48, due to pneumonia induced by influenza complications and the flu outbreak in Japan recently.
