News & Perspective

(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) – The fatality rate for officially confirmed human cases of H5N1 avian influenza infection is a stunningly high 59% (345 deaths in 584 cases). But the current controversy over publishing data about transmissible H5N1 viruses has revived a debate about whether the virus is as lethal as those numbers say.

(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) – In a bird's eye view of pandemic H1N1 seroprevalence studies published so far, the World Health Organization (WHO) said today the reports consistently show older people had partial protection and that infection rates were higher in younger people, but it's too soon to estimate a global attack rate.

(CIDRAP News) – A preliminary study from Germany suggests that an adjuvanted vaccine against the pandemic H1N1 virus was highly effective in adolescents and younger adults and moderately effective in older people, according to a report published yesterday in Eurosurveillance.

(CIDRAP News) – European countries won't likely experience another wave of pandemic H1N1 influenza cases this spring and summer, though the virus will probably continue to circulate and be the region's dominant strain for the next flu season, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) said today.