The flu, an annual plague that claims twice as many lives as road carnage, has struck relatively early and alarmingly hard this year, adding urgency to the importance of getting vaccinated, the most effective protection individually and collectively.
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Everyone is at risk, but the young, the elderly, Indigenous Australians and those with chronic ill health are particularly vulnerable.
Anyone with a chronic health problem is 40 times more likely than average to contract the illness. Pregnant women should also make sure they are vaccinated, doctors say.
All this, surely, should give the fortunately robust members of the ''herd'', as health experts explain it, an attractive reason to inoculate themselves primarily to protect others. Yet only an estimated one in 10 does so for that primal motivation.
There is much room for life-saving progress. Vaccination has a 70 per cent success rate, yet a recent survey found that only 40 per cent of adults intend to get jabbed, and only one in 10 reckons children should be.
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This is not so much about ideology (for anti-vaxxers are few and discredited), but, perhaps, apathy and unawareness.
Nationally, more than 60 people have died of flu before the onset of the winter peak, including children.
Stricken aged-care residents have died in alarmingly high numbers already, and the danger presented by this perpetually mutating killer virus is pertinent to the royal commission into the sector, which comes less than two years after 10 people died from the flu at Wangaratta's St John's Village nursing home.
The risk must not be ignored, for the potential consequences are evident and vaccination is free to many and affordable to most of those who might not be eligible for full government subsidisation.
This year flu is expected to cause or contribute to the death of as many as 4000 Australian residents, up a quarter on what is already a chilling annual average.
Good luck, everyone, in this particularly menacing flu season. But it is not a great idea to rely on chance on this one - get a jab if you're able and don't turn up crook at work - presenteeism is as dopey, for different reasons, as absenteeism.