The Coming Plague

You have probably heard that the current flu vaccine matches the current flue strains in the US very poorly, perhaps at about a 40 percent rate. Flu and the vaccine mismatch is a post at Effect Measure that will update you on this important issue. This is especially important because you need to understand what vaccines do, how they work and how they don't work.

The simultaneous news of widespread flu and the mismatch of two components of this year's seasonal vaccine (see here and here) seem to have synergized. That's not so good in the view of many flu experts, who believe (correctly) that it leads to a misunderstanding of how the vaccine works (or doesn't)

Then there's the bird flu:

Chinese Woman Dies of Bird Flu from PhysOrg.com

(AP) -- A migrant worker has died of the H5N1 virus in southern China, the Hong Kong government said Tuesday, as the country confirmed its fourth outbreak of bird flu among poultry this year.

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But good news about Sleeping Sickness:

African sleeping sickness could be eliminated say tropical disease experts from PhysOrg.com

While the annual number of new detected cases of African sleeping sickness has been falling since the late 1990s, there could still be a resurgence of the disease unless control efforts are maintained, say tropical disease experts in this week's PLoS Medicine.

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