On the 28th of January 2022 a 75-year-old man was admitted to the regional Albury Wodonga Health Service with a high fever and Parkinsonian symptoms. The patient spent over a week in intensive care, but brain scans did not reveal an obvious aetiology and assays for a range of pathogens came up negative.

When serology eventually revealed the presence of antibodies against Japanese encephalitis virus this became only the second ever locally-acquired case on Australia’s mainland. Even more startling was the fact that the previous one had been way back in 1998 in Cape York, far north Queensland. 

The Victorian patient was the first what would become an outbreak of 43 symptomatic human cases that resulted in six deaths. The JE virus would be detected in all mainland states and retrospectively linked to another fatality in March 2021 from the Tiwi islands of the Northern Territory. In this podcast we hear about the confluence of factors that brought a classically tropical disease to the southern states. The story is told from the perspective of the treating clinicians, microbiology specialist and public health physician who started putting the puzzle together from four sentinel cases.

Key Reference

• Samuel Thorburn, Deborah Friedman, John Burston, Paul M Kinsella, Genevieve E Martin, Deborah Williamson, Justin Jackson. Sentinel cluster of locally acquired Japanese encephalitis in southern Australia. Internal Medicine Journal. 2023;53(5):835-840

Member access to Internal Medicine Journal, Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health and Occupational Medicine Journal

Guests
Adjunct Associate Professor Ian Woolley FRACP (Monash Infectious Diseases; Monash University)
Dr Justin Jackson FRACP (Albury Wodonga Health)
Dr Sam Thorburn (Austin Health)
Dr Paul Kinsella (Victorian Infectious Diseases Reference Laboratory, Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity)
Associate Professor Deborah Friedman FRACP (Victorian Department of Health; Deakin University)

Production
Produced by Mic Cavazzini DPhil. Music licenced from Epidemic Sound includes ‘Dusty Delta Day’ and ‘Hard Shoulder’ by Lennon Hutton. Editorial feedback kindly provided by Dr Aidan Tan. 

Please visit the Pomegranate Health web page for a transcript and supporting references. Login to MyCPD to record listening and reading as a prefilled learning activity. Subscribe to new episode email alerts or search for ‘Pomegranate Health’ in Apple Podcasts, Spotify,Castbox, or any podcasting app.