News & Perspective

(CIDRAP News) – New European studies reported today in Eurosurveillance suggest that this year's influenza vaccine is providing good protection against influenza B viruses but only moderate protection against type A—findings more or less consistent with earlier results in the United States.

(CIDRAP News) – The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) yesterday approved the nation's first cell-based flu vaccine, a product from Novartis that uses technology that could help vaccinate more Americans in a pandemic but still has many of the same limitations of older egg-based flu vaccines.

(CIDRAP News) – Novartis's new cell-culture based influenza vaccine factory in North Carolina has begun making a prepandemic H5N1 flu vaccine and is ready to start producing vaccines for a real pandemic when needed, the company and federal health officials announced yesterday.

The facility in Holly Springs, N.C., billed as the first of its kind in the United States, was dedicated yesterday after a long testing process.

(CIDRAP News) – A recent case-control study estimates that the adjuvanted pandemic H1N1 influenza vaccine used in Canada was effective 93% of the time, a substantially higher figure than seen in several other studies and one that has raised some eyebrows among other flu vaccine researchers.