Age-standardised mortality rates for deaths involving coronavirus (COVID-19), non-COVID-19 deaths and all deaths by vaccination status, broken down by age group.

Provisional counts of the number of death occurrences in England and Wales due to coronavirus (COVID-19) and influenza and pneumonia, by age, sex and place of death.

Flu vaccine uptake (%) in adults aged 65 and over, who received the flu vaccination between 1st September to the end of February as recorded in the GP record. The February collection has been adopted for our end of season figures from 2017 to 2018. All previous data is the same definitions but until the end of January rather than February to consider data returning from outside the practice and later in practice vaccinations.RationaleInfluenza (also known as Flu) is a highly infectious viral illness spread by droplet infection. The flu vaccination is offered to people who are at greater risk of developing serious complications if they catch the flu. The seasonal influenza programme for England is set out in the Annual Flu Letter. Both the flu letter and the flu plan have the support of the Chief Medical Officer (CMO), Chief Pharmaceutical Officer (CPhO), and Director of Nursing.Vaccination coverage is the best indicator of the level of protection a population will have against vaccine-preventable communicable diseases. Immunisation is one of the most effective healthcare interventions available, and flu vaccines can prevent illness and hospital admissions among these groups of people. Increasing the uptake of the flu vaccine among these high-risk groups should also contribute to easing winter pressure on primary care services and hospital admissions. Coverage is closely related to levels of disease. Monitoring coverage identifies possible drops in immunity before levels of disease rise.The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) will continue to provide expert advice and monitoring of public health, including immunisation. NHS England now has responsibility for commissioning the flu programme, and GPs continue to play a key role. NHS England teams will ensure that robust plans are in place locally and that high vaccination uptake levels are reached in the clinical risk groups. For more information, see the Green Book chapter 19 on Influenza.The Annual Flu Letter sets out the national vaccine uptake ambitions each year. In 2021 to 2022, the national ambition was to achieve at least 85 percent vaccine uptake in those aged 65 and over. Prior to this, the national vaccine uptake ambition was 75 percent, in line with WHO targets.Definition of numeratorNumerator is the number of vaccinations administered during the influenza season between 1st September and the end of February.Definition of denominatorDenominator is the GP registered population on the date of extraction including patients who have been offered the vaccine but refused it, as the uptake rate is measured against the overall eligible population. For more detailed information please see the user guide, available to view and download from https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/vaccine-uptake#seasonal-flu-vaccine-uptakeCaveatsRead codes are primarily used for data collection purposes to extract vaccine uptake data for patients who fall into one or more of the designated clinical risk groups. The codes identify individuals at risk, and therefore eligible for flu vaccination. However, it is important to note that there may be some individuals with conditions not specified in the recommended risk groups for vaccination, who may be offered influenza vaccine by their GP based on clinical judgement and according to advice contained in the flu letter and Green Book, and thus are likely to fall outside the listed Read codes. Therefore, this data should not be used for GP payment purposes.

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner. The aim of this project was to examine various aspects of the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic in Britain, particularly in England and Wales. The research was undertaken as part of the depositor's PhD project entitled Aspects of the historical geography of the 1918-19 influenza pandemic in Britain for the University of Cambridge. Main Topics: This data collection consists of weekly influenza mortality figures (number of deaths and crude death rate) for all counties, county boroughs, London boroughs, urban districts and metropolitan boroughs in England and Wales, for the duration of the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic. Please note: this study does not include information on named individuals and would therefore not be useful for personal family history research.

The dataset provides a list of the wild birds identified and submitted under both passive and active (targeted) surveillance programmes in Great Britain for testing for Avian Influenza by the Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA). The main emphasis in the surveillance programmes is on patrols of designated reserves by skilled wild bird ecologists and wardens to locate “found dead” wild birds, including “mass mortality incidents”. These Warden Patrols continue all-year-round, and are also seasonally targeted in the winter and spring periods (October to March) each year. Members of the public are also asked to remain vigilant for mass bird mortality incidents occurring in any location in GB and report these to the Defra Helpline. The criteria for a “mass mortality incident” are five or more wild birds of any species at any location in England, Scotland and Wales. The dataset contains information on the identity of the bird, the date, location and which samples were taken from those birds and their test results. Please Note: The location represents a 10km x 10km square in which the bird was found. Location data is provided by the submitter and is not verified and, if no location information is available, the location of the testing laboratory may be used. For further information and explanations of the data included in this dataset, please see the data dictionary available for download alongside this dataset. Attribution statement:

Forecast: Influenza Mortality in the UK 2023 - 2027 Discover more data with ReportLinker!

BackgroundTo evaluate the risk of foetal loss associated with pandemic influenza vaccination in pregnancy. Retrospective cohort study. UK General Practice Research Database Pregnancies ending in delivery or spontaneous foetal death after 21 October 2009 and starting before 01 January 2010. Methodology/Principal FindingsHazard ratios of foetal death for vaccinated compared to unvaccinated pregnancies were estimated for gestational weeks 9 to 12, 13 to 24 and 25 to 43 using discrete-time survival analysis. Separate models were specified to evaluate whether the potential effect of vaccination on foetal loss might be transient (for ∼4 weeks post vaccination only) or more permanent (for the duration of the pregnancy). 39,863 pregnancies meeting our inclusion criteria contributed a total of 969,322 gestational weeks during the study period. 9,445 of the women were vaccinated before or during pregnancy. When the potential effect of vaccination was assumed to be transient, the hazard of foetal death during gestational weeks 9 through 12 (HRunadj 0.56; CI95 0.43 to 0.73) and 13 through 24 (HRunadj 0.45; CI95 0.28 to 0.73) was lower in the 4 weeks after vaccination than in other weeks. Where the more permanent exposure definition was specified, vaccinated pregnancies also had a lower hazard of foetal loss than unvaccinated pregnancies in gestational weeks 9 through 12 (HRunadj 0.74; CI95 0.62 to 0.88) and 13 through 24 (HRunadj 0.59; CI95 0.45 to 0.77). There was no difference in the hazard of foetal loss during weeks 25 to 43 in either model. Sensitivity analyses suggest the strong protective associations observed may be due in part to unmeasured confounding. Conclusions/SignificanceInfluenza vaccination during pregnancy does not appear to increase the risk of foetal death. This study therefore supports the continued recommendation of influenza vaccination of pregnant women.

The dataset provides a list of the wild birds identified and submitted under both passive and active (targeted) surveillance programmes in Great Britain for testing for Avian Influenza by the Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA). The main emphasis in the surveillance programmes is on patrols of designated reserves by skilled wild bird ecologists and wardens to locate “found dead” wild birds, including “mass mortality incidents”. These Warden Patrols continue all-year-round, and are also seasonally targeted in the winter and spring periods (October to March) each year. Members of the public are also asked to remain vigilant for mass bird mortality incidents occurring in any location in GB and report these to the Defra Helpline. The criteria for a “mass mortality incident” are five or more wild birds of any species at any location in England, Scotland and Wales. The dataset contains information on the identity of the bird, the date, location and which samples were taken from those birds and their test results. Please Note: The location represents a 10km x 10km square in which the bird was found. Location data is provided by the submitter and is not verified and, if no location information is available, the location of the testing laboratory may be used. For further information and explanations of the data included in this dataset, please see the data dictionary available for download alongside this dataset. Attribution statement:

This dataset contains the concentration of eleven antibiotics (trimethoprim, oxytetracycline, ciprofloxacin, azithromycin, cefotaxime, doxycycline, sulfamethoxazole, erythromycin, clarithromycin, ofloxacin, norfloxacin), three decongestants (naphazoline, oxymetazoline, xylometazoline) and the antiviral drug oseltamivir's active metabolite, oseltamivir carboxylate, measured at 21 locations within the River Thames catchment in England. The measurements were taken weekly during November 2009, once in March 2010 and once in May 2011, with the aim to quantify pharmaceutical usage during the influenza pandemic of 2009 and how this compares to inter-pandemic drug use. River samples were acquired by grab samples in glass jars and analysed by liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (LC MS). Two wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) in southern England (Benson and Oxford) were also sampled during the peak of the second wave of the 2009 influenza A[H1N1]pdm09 pandemic (10-11 November 2009) and on 15 May 2011 using an automated sampler set to acquired hourly (time proportional) samples from the influent and effluent of the WWTPs. The WWTPs are the source for all the drugs found in the river, hence, these were studied to understand the differential fate of the analytes in the two very different WWTPs. Flows for the WWTP and River sampling locations are presented for each of the sampling times to allow for determining hourly loads for the WWTP and daily loads for the river.

COVID-19 is the first known coronavirus pandemic. Nevertheless, the seasonal circulation of the four milder coronaviruses of humans – OC43, NL63, 229E and HKU1 – raises the possibility that these viruses are the descendants of more ancient coronavirus pandemics. This proposal arises by analogy to the observed descent of seasonal influenza subtypes H2N2 (now extinct), H3N2 and H1H1 from the pandemic strains of 1957, 1968 and 2009, respectively. Recent historical revisionist speculation has focussed on the influenza pandemic of 1889-1892, based on molecular phylogenetic reconstructions that show the emergence of human coronavirus OC43 around that time, probably by zoonosis from cattle. If the “Russian influenza”, as The Times named it in early 1890, was not influenza but caused by a coronavirus, the origins of the other three milder human coronaviruses may also have left a residue of clinical evidence in the 19th century medical literature and popular press. In this paper, we search digitised 19th century British newspapers for evidence of previously unsuspected coronavirus pandemics. We conclude that there is little or no corpus linguistic signal in the UK national press for large-scale outbreaks of unidentified respiratory disease for the period 1785 to 1890. Methods The data file is a spreadsheet used to record queries made via CQPweb (https://cqpweb.lancs.ac.uk). Search Terms For clarity, in the ensuing descriptions, we use bold font for search terms and italic font for collocates and other quotations. Based on clinical descriptions of COVID-19 (reviewed by Cevik et al., 2020), we identified the following search terms: 1) “cough”, 2) “fever”, 3) “pneumonia”. To avoid confusion with years when influenza pandemics may have occurred, we added 4) “influenza” and 5) “epidemic”. Any combination of terms 1 to 3 co-occurring with term 4 alone or terms 4 and 5 together, would be indicative of a respiratory outbreak caused by, or at the least attributed to, influenza. By contrast, any combination of terms 1 to 3 co-occurring with term 5 alone, or without either of terms 4 and 5, would suggest a respiratory disease that was not confidently identified as influenza at the time. This outbreak would provide a candidate coronavirus epidemic for further investigation. Newspapers Newspapers and years searched were as follows: Belfast Newsletter (1828-1900), The Era (1838-1900), Glasgow Herald (1820-1900), Hampshire & Portsmouth Telegraph (1799-1900), Ipswich Journal (1800-1900), Liverpool Mercury (1811-1900), Northern Echo (1870-1900) Pall Mall Gazette (1865-1900), Reynold’s Daily (1850-1900), Western Mail (1869-1900) and The Times (1785-2009). The search in The Times was extended to 2009 in order to provide a comparison with the 20th century. Searches were performed using Lancaster University’s instance of the CQPweb (Corpus Query Processor) corpus analysis software (https://cqpweb.lancs.ac.uk/; Hardie, 2012). CQPweb’s database is populated from the newspapers listed, using optical character recognition (OCR), so for older publications in particular, some errors may be present (McEnery et al., 2019). Statistics The occurrence of each of the five search terms was calculated per million words within the annual output of each publication, in CQPweb. This is compared to a background distribution constituting the corresponding words per million for each search term over the total year range for each newspaper. Within the annual distributions, for each search term and each newspaper, we determined the years lying in the top 1% (i.e. p<0.05 after application of a Bonferroni correction), following Gabrielatos et al. (2012). These are deemed to be years when that search term was in statistically significant usage above its background level for the newspaper in which it occurs. For years when search terms were significantly elevated, we also calculated collocates at range n. Collocates, in corpus linguistics, are other words found at statistically significant usage, over their own background levels, in a window from n positions to the left to n positions to the right of the search term. In other words, they are found in significant proximity to the search term. A default value of n=10 was used throughout, unless specified. Collocation analysis therefore assists in showing how a search term associates with other words within a corpus, providing information about the context in which that search term is used. CQPweb provides a log ratio method for the quantification of the strength of collocation.