News & Perspective

(CIDRAP News) – The nation's supply of pandemic vaccine has grown to 111 million doses, enough so that the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is turning part of its attention toward boosting the percentage of adults who get vaccinated.

(CIDRAP News) – A study in Australia showed that one dose of H1N1 influenza vaccine, rather than the two doses recommended in the United States, was enough to generate a probably protective immune response in children younger than 9 years.

Dec 9, 2009 (CIDRAP News) – In an update of a review on the role of neuraminidase inhibitors in seasonal flu prevention and treatment, the authors reversed a previous conclusion that oseltamivir (Tamiflu) prevents complications like pneumonia in healthy patients because they were unable to reconstruct the data in one of the key studies that found a benefit.

(CIDRAP News) – Federal officials, along with representatives from four vaccine companies, appeared before two US House of Representatives committees today to answer questions about why the nation hasn't stretched scarce pandemic vaccine supply with adjuvants and if a more federally directed distribution system might help vaccine get to more high-risk patients.

A reanalysis prompted by reviewers has changed the conclusions of a study comparing N-95 respirators with surgical masks, raising questions about earlier findings that the N-95 devices were clearly more effective in protecting healthcare workers from respiratory illness.

(CIDRAP News) – A study of California's most severely ill patients during the first 16 weeks of the novel H1N1 pandemic is in line with other recent studies that have shown two unique features of the virus—that it hits young people hard and that obesity appears to be a risk factor.

(CIDRAP News) – The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) today confirmed the pandemic H1N1 flu virus in a sample from a Minnesota pig, marking the first detection of the virus in pigs in the United States.