Viruses, flu, & immunology

Here's what I distracted myself with this morning. Don't mix these at home. Wired Sci examines how Testosterone Makes People Suspicious of One Another. And that's a hell of a photo. New Flu Vaccines Could Protect Against All Strains If all goes well, of course. Not to count on at this point, but an interesting look at one direction in vaccine development. I covered another approach in an Technology Review article last year, when I also looked at the weird history of adjuvants. (If you want, check out my complete vaccine coverage. You can find also some other good ones at the Technology…

Helen Branswell, ace flu reporter, delivers the goodsl: TORONTO A landmark study looking at how to limit the spread of influenza has shown what experts have long believed but hadn't until now proved: Giving flu shots to kids helps protect everyone in a community from the virus. The study, led by Dr. Mark Loeb of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont., showed the risk of catching the flu was lowered by nearly 60 per cent in communities where a substantial portion of kids aged three to 15 got flu shots. That level of indirect protection is nearly as good as what healthy adults might expect…

1. Maybe it was just the headline ... but the runaway winner was "No pity party, no macho man." Psychologist Dave Grossman on surviving killing. Actually I think it was the remarkable photo, which looks like a painting. Check it out. 2. I'm not vulnerable, just especially plastic. Risk genes, environment, and evolution, in the Atlantic. The blog post about the article that led to the book. 3. Senator Asks Pentagon To Review Antidepressants 4. Gorgeous thing of the day: Sky's-eye view of the Maldives & other islands 5. The Weird History of Vaccine Adjuvants, even though it was from Oct 1…

Pardon my light posting lately. Flat out with big projects, travel, and the stacking of the wood for the winter. This, however, is what has jumped out at me from the intertubez of late: Meet the New Health Care Reform, Same as the Old Health Care Reform At Top Schools, More Than Half the Profs Have Industry Ties US: Shortage of flu vaccines leaves healthcare workers vulnerable Our lack of readyness for this thing is sobering -- as is the complacency about same. In my own town, our much-delayed swine flu vaccines for kids is finally being administered this coming Monday. How'd I hear this? It…

In a disturbing post at ScienceInsider, Jon Cohen and Martin Enserink explain why the swine flu vaccine is running so late. Or at least they try to explain why it's so late. For while all the suppliers are running into problems, we're not allowed to know what they are. The delays are substantial and critical. They leave us naked as the flu spreads through the country. The flu has now killed 1000 people, over 100 of them children. Even as this happens, the delivery dates keep moving back and the delivery amounts keep shrinking. As recently as a month ago, the CDC was telling us that we'd…

Nurses and doctors have won a victory in their battle for their "right" to infect patients with easily prevented pandemic influenza. Judge Halts Flu Vaccine Mandate For Health Workers via pandemicchronicle.com Posted via web from David Dobbs's Somatic Marker

"The Brite Nightgown," from Donald Fagen's First And Only Solo Tour (2006) - Dana Blankenhorn, who brings a distinctive mix of skepticism, intelligence, and gruff impatience to his flu coverage, digests some unsettling stats from the JAMA articles. Some of his highlights: * Health care workers get little protection from fancy masks. Workers given ordinary medical masks had a nearly 1 in 4 chance of getting the disease. The same for those given fancy N95 fitted masks. Many medical workers have been resisting getting the shot. * Hospitals must be prepared for extraordinary burdens in the…

Probably dreaming. But these the rise of the public option and the fade of the flu sometimes seem so real. swine flu, public option, healthcare reform

I've wondered many times, including out loud in Slate, why it's not common in the U.S. to give flu vaccinations at schools, so they could efficiently be given to the population (children) whose inoculation most effectively prevents epidemics or pandemics, as well as to anyone else who wanted one. Same place, procedure, and personnel every year. It would simply and speed things immensely, and save scads of money? This story in the Times has me asking the question anew. Instead of a single date (or a few dates) in which people can line up and get their shots in an orderly, efficient process,…

Never know what'll top the charts. Top post was a post I put up in January, "Pfizer takes $2.3 billion offl-label marketing fine." That post reported the news (via FiercePharma) that Pfizer had tucked away in its financial disclosure forms a $2.3 billion charge to end the federal investigation into allegations of off-label promotions of its Cox-2 painkillers, including Bextra. (Lot of money ... but it didn't quite wipe out the company's 2008 net income.) The company had set aside the money as part of a deal it was negotiating Justiice. Finalizing the deal, however, took until September. At…

Lots of flu news out there. Here's my short list for the day: Helen Branswell reports that WHO is unpersuaded by the unpublished paper showing seasonal flu vaccine may raise chance of getting swine flu. (Anomalies are usually anomalies.) Canada has been thrown into quite a bit of confusion by this report, with some provinces holding off on seasonal flu vaccines. Meanwhile, an OB notes an extraordinary death toll of H5N1 among pregnant women. Greg Laden has an extremely short post suggesting how difficult these two bits of news are when you (or your wife) are actually pregnant. The gist: The…

You have to move fast these days to keep up with the flu. Or outrun it. A quick roundup from the last 24: From the invaluable H5N1: Mexico: 4,000 H1N1 cases in 7 days Spain: 31,322 cases and 6 deaths in one week US: 15 states could run out of hospital beds Scotland sees it Worst week yet for swine flu, with new cases running at 2,000 a day Toronto catches the wave. Meanwhile, Helen Branswell reports that Dutch researchers find mutation linked to greater virulence in swine flu virus -- but so far it doesn't appear to be the big upgrade in nasty we've been fearing. Effect Measure gives…

Last week the Times ran a story by Andrew Pollack, Benefit and Doubt in Vaccine Additive, that covered some of the ground I trod in my Slate story, "To Boost or Not to Boost: The United States' swine flu vaccines will leave millions worldwide unprotected. Pollack also had the room to explore something I lacked room for -- the fascinating history of adjuvants, and the strange mystery of how they work. Like so many things that work in medicine, adjuvants were discovered more or less by accident -- and were in fact a "dirty little secret" in a fairly literal sense. As the Wikipedia entry…

Updates from the flu front: Confusion grows over the still-unreleased study that apparently finds, contrary to other studies, that getting this year's seasonal flu shot may raise your risk of getting swine flu. Peter Sandman, meanwhile, argues that since the swine flu seems to have largely displaced the seasonal flu, getting vaccinated for the latter doesn't make much sense. (I'm doing so this afternoon anyway.) WaPo notes that the swine flu's second wave is starting to really make itself felt in the U.S., with over half the states reporting widespread flu activity. Low stocks of Tamiflu (…

[Note: An update from 25 Sept 09 is at bottom] Here's a sad mess. It seems a potentially important finding -- that getting a seasonal flu shot might increase risk of contracting the swine flu -- is being sat on by a journal, with the authors forbidden from talking about it, until they get through the slo-mo publishing process. The finding may or may not be accurate. But as it regards an important issue, it needs to be vetted and discussed openly, with the data at hand, as soon as possible. But it's not. This is a tricky situation, to be sure. There are, at least theoretically, both good and…

Eric Michael Johnson contemplates the hearts, minds, teeth, and claws of bonobos and other primates. Tara Smith explains why she'll be getting her kids their (seasonal) flu vaccines. Revere does likewise Daniel Menaker, former honcho at Random House, defends the midlist. (Where was he when my book was getting so much push?) Just in case you missed it, lack of insurance is killing 45,000 people a year (Times) in the U.S. This doesn't include preventable deaths among the underinsured (like yours truly, who is sitting on some surgery that he'd rather put behind him). You can download the…

My latest piece for Slate examines the unsettling consequences of the United States' choice of swine flu vaccines. The good news about these vaccines is that, to judge by the first vaccine trial results, published last week, they appear to work fast, safely â and at about a half to a quarter of the doses that the CDC expected. This means we effectively have about two to four times as many vaccines as we had figured we would. Since we ordered 195 million doses, we could vaccinate damn near the whole country. If the fast-tracking efforts continue to work and the flu peaks closer to Christmas…

via blogs.wsj.com This is something we need to know. Let's hope we like the answer. Posted via web from David Dobbs's Somatic Marker

For a while that seemed to hold true. The biology seemed sound and all was very reassuring. Then, suddenly, in the 2007-2008 flu season the H1N1 seasonal influenza (not the swine flu H1N1) developed Tamiflu resistance and in a remarkably short time almost all of the H1N1 seasonal flu was resistant to Tamiflu. via scienceblogs.com Posted via web from David Dobbs's Somatic Marker

I regret I can't treat at more, um, length, the following weighty matters: Size Matters; So Do Lies   Nate Silver finds that Matt Kibbe, the president of FreedomWorks, speaking of the 9/12 tea party rally in DC, " did the equivalent of telling people that his penis is 53 inches long." Dr. Nobody Again Questions JAMA Disclosure Policies in which Philip Dawdy and Jonathan Leo, a dangerous combination, butt heads with JAMA Self-Destruct Button, Activiated! Baucus and Conrad decide maybe Joe Wilson had a point after all. Swine Flu Mystery in Healthy Young Puts Focus on Genetics, Deep Inhaling (…