Furthermore, in outbreaks of a novel influenza strain, generally children and young adults of the population, who will have little or no prior immunity to the disease [4] , are disproportionately affected [28] . Implementing our detection algorithm using these data attributes will further improve the timeliness and specificity of the detection of pandemic influenza. SERVIS data contain age attributes which could be incorporated into our algorithm, but this requires more sentinel GPs to be of use.