H1N1 Vaccine: The Slow Supply Slogs On

It had been a month since I wrote about the H1N1 influenza vaccine supply, and I was curious what had happened during November. The numbers aren’t pretty.
According to a Dec. 4 Webpost by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as of Dec. 3, a total of 63.3 million H1N1 doses had shipped to U.S. providers. Shipments [...]

All’s Fair in Love and Influenza?

I’m a healthy 39-year-old with no chronic health conditions that put me into one of the H1N1 vaccine priority groups.  Still, when I found out yesterday at a routine visit that my ob.gyn was offering the vaccine to all patients, I couldn’t roll up my sleeve fast enough.  I felt a little guilty given shortage [...]

What H1N1 Tells Us

Here’s the answer: The current H1N1 flu pandemic tells us we need a better, faster way to make flu vaccines.
Monday, Oct. 5 was an important day in the influenza world: It was the day the new H1N1 vaccine rolled out, it conincidently was the CDC’s official start to the new U.S. flu season (even though H1N1 infections have [...]

Is the H1N1 Vaccine Safe Enough?

from a meeting of the National Vaccine Advisory Committee, Washington D.C.
Vaccine safety is a contentious topic, and it looks like the new vaccines against pandemic H1N1 flu will face some skepticism as they start to roll out to the American public in early October. This was clear in a brief but telling exchange during a meeting Sept. [...]

The Masque of the Red Death

 
Forget the Senate Finance Committee’s Gang of Six – the hottest health care story in Congress may soon be the Senate Page Program Five. 
 
As in Edgar Allan Poe’s pre-SARS tale of uninvited pestilence surprising opulent wealth, America’s political Princes Prospero have unmasked an unwelcome H1N1 party crasher in the midst of their gilded ballroom of bloviation.
 
Five party crashers, to be precise.
 
To be even more [...]

Flu Stays One Step Ahead

From JAMA,  the journal of the American Medical Association.
The influenza virus continues to lay low any infectious disease experts who claim to truly understand it, as two articles and an editorial in JAMA recently showed.
One report from the CDC found that influenza A (H1N1) resistance to oseltamivir, one of the main drugs used to treat [...]

Opportunity Missed

From the joint annual meeting of the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotheraphy and the Infectious Diseases Society of America

 
 

…Standing between half a dozen posters detailing the abysmal rates of flu and other vaccination among health care workers, a presenter whose poster is on that very topic comments said to this (as yet unvaccinated, severely [...]