Past exposure to influenza virus or antigens—whether by infection or vaccine—might reduce a person's ability to mount a broadly protective antibody response to the virus, a finding that could complicate efforts to develop a "game-changing" universal flu vaccine, according to a study yesterday in Science Translational Medicine.
In a related development, feds recently issued a second call for avian flu vaccine proposals.
Overall flu activity has remained low, with hot spots in only a few areas, such as some Middle Eastern countries including Bahrain, Oman, and Qatar, which are reporting that the 2009 H1N1 virus is the dominant strain, the World Health Organization (WHO) said yesterday in its regular update.
Agriculture officials in Vietnam reported another highly pathogenic H5N1 outbreak in poultry, while Canadian authorities reported that low pathogenic H5N2 turned up in a hunter-shot duck in British Columbia.
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) yesterday approved the nation's first seasonal flu vaccine containing an adjuvant—an immune-boosting substance—although European and other countries have used adjuvanted vaccines for years.
African detections signal ongoing H5N1 activity in the region, while Vietnam and Hong Kong both reported H5N6 detections.
US flu activity rose slightly last week, with two regions of the country—the south central and central Midwest—at or above their regional baseline that measures clinic visits for flulike illness, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said today in its weekly update.
Vietnam reported small outbreaks of H5N1 and H5N6 avian flu in backyard poultry flocks, according to reports posted yesterday by the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE), while Hong Kong officials said they had detected an H5 avian flu virus in a dead Oriental magpie robin.
Nigeria yesterday notified the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) of four outbreaks of H5N1 avian flu affecting more than 31,000 poultry, while South Korea yesterday reported 12 outbreaks of H5N8 avian flu involving more than 140,000 birds that occurred in September and October.
Countries in the Americas and Caribbean reported 4,370 recent cases of chikungunya, bringing the outbreak total to 1,768,106, according to a Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) update from late last week.
