If you live in the Northern Hemisphere, you know that the days are getting colder and the mercury is dropping a bit every day. This makes for the perfect weather for that mug of hot chocolate and some warm ginger or cinnamon cookies, doesn’t it?  But it is also a prime season for something else – flu. The cold, dry, winter air makes us susceptible to influenza. Not a lot of us take influenza very seriously, we call it just a viral fever and get on with life, but globally, it is a huge thing and there are response and surveillance systems that keep an eye on what’s happening with influenza everywhere. And this is not a new development, health authorities have been trying to combat and control the spread of influenza since the 40s.

In 1947, the WHO Interim Committee of the United Nations agreed to begin a Global Influenza Program – the GIP, for the study and control of influenza. It was a time when a major outbreak of influenza in Europe was an immediate concern, so identifying the virus responsible for it, and developing vaccines that would help fight the virus was a top priority. Sounds like a familiar circumstance now, doesn’t it? Regional Influenza Centers were set up in response in 1948. Then, five years later, the Global Influenza Surveillance Network or GISN was established as there was a need for an influenza surveillance system to keep track of the methods and measures being deployed for disease prevention and control. This GISN then got renamed to what we today know as the Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System or GISRS.

Every year, sentinel physicians and hospital networks contribute about 3-4 million clinical specimens with related information to the National Influenza Centers for virus detection and preliminary analysis, reports WHO. From these, about 40,000 are sent to the WHO Collaborating Centers, where 10,00 of these 40,000 are characterized for their antigenic and genetic properties.

At that time, the countries also agreed to work with the WHO to develop an Influenza Virus Traceability Mechanism (IVTM) which would help track all influenza viruses that existed across the globe and had pandemic potential. The IVTM, it was agreed, would let the users trace the geographic transfer of influenza viruses sing Geotrace and also be able to view the derivation tree for these.

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