Am I dreaming, or are both swine flu and the healtcare reform backlash in retreat?
Probably dreaming. But now and then it all seems so real.
Continue reading →Tag: Public health
Swine flu vaccine ‘nightmare’ — and neither flu nor vaccine is even here yet
Tell me again why we don’t just have vaccination clinics at school?
Continue reading →Neuron Culture’s Top Ten from September
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. … Because my post was was one of the few things already on the interwebz before Justice held its news conference, the Google rush shot it toward the top of the search results.
Continue reading →Flu roundup cont’d
Here’s my short list for the day: Helen Branswell reports that WHO is unpersuaded by the unpublished paper showing seasonal flu vaccine may raise chance of getting swine flu. … The gist: The possibility that the seasonal flu vaccine could increase risk of contracting swine flu, says Laden, “concerns me quite a bit, as my wife is 8 months pregnant, flu is a very serious risk for pregnant women and their babies , she teaches in a high school, and got her seasonal flu shot last week..” One can hope, fervently, that the swine-flu vaccines, which start getting punched into people in the U.S. today , find their way very rapidly to a flu clinic near Laden’s better half.
Continue reading →Flu roundup: A marked (and tweeted) acceleration
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. … And a couple doctors tweeting from Dell Children’s Hospital in Austin, where they set up tents to handle the overflow, record a remarkable surge there.
Continue reading →Swine flu spreads, and confusion with it
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.)
Continue reading →Quick dip: Bonobo teeth, flu vaccines, death-of-midlist 3.0, death of the uninsured, and gory films
Eric Michael Johnson contemplates the hearts, minds, teeth, and claws of bonobos and other primates, while — no fault of Eric’s — the flu, the end of publishing, and the death of the uninsured march on. Plus some great old surgery footage.
Continue reading →Much ado about swine flu
As the World Health Organisation meets in Hong-Kong to discuss, among other things, swine flu, here are a couple that make good follow-ups to my Slate piece on how adjuvants gobble up vaccine antigen supply.
Continue reading →Misdiagnosing the live and the dead
Hard to accept that doctors miss things. They always will. The shame is that they so often miss things and then bury the mistakes — as they do now about 10-15% of the time.
Continue reading →To boost or not to boost, or how our H1N1 vaccines will leave millions naked
The good news? The US’s swine flu vaccines seem to work really well. The bad news? Because they use twice as much antigen as necessary, they leave about a quarter BILLION people elsewhere naked to the virus.
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