About half the US population should get vaccinated against A(H1N1) influenza, but pregnant women and healthcare workers should be at the front of the line, US health advisers agreed on Wednesday.
Up to 160 million doses of flu vaccine will be available for the start of a vaccination campaign planned for mid-October. The Advisory Panel on Immunization Practices recommended that state and local health officials prepare to vaccinate as many as 150 million people.
Each person will likely need two flu vaccine doses and officials said it was not clear exactly how much vaccine would be available and when.
“The main message is that it’s half the population [who are the priority to be vaccinated]. And it’s the younger half of the population, as well as health care workers,” said Kathy Neuzil, ACIP influenza work group chairwoman.
The group nearly unanimously accepted advice from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The Human Services Department almost always follow the advice of the committee.
The recommendations said pregnant women, people who care for babies and healthcare workers should be the first protected against the virus — a total of around 41 million people — in the event that not enough vaccine is available.
People at risk of serious complications from catching the flu should follow — and then healthy young adults aged 19 to 24, the panel said.
Members of the panel said young adults should be a priority because they are more likely to become infected and tend to work in places that would accelerate the flu’s spread.
“They penetrate our society at service-level jobs, at entry-level jobs, so there is going to be a lot of transmission from these people,” panel member Carol Baker of the Baylor College of Medicine in Texas told the meeting.
Pregnant women are at special risk from the new strain, and vaccinating them protects their newborns, too, the CDC’s Anthony Fiore told the committee.
A CDC report released earlier on Wednesday showed pregnant women were four times as likely as other people to suffer severe complications and even die from A(H1N1) infection.
Five companies are making A(H1N1) vaccine for the US market — AstraZeneca’s MedImmune unit, Australia’s CSL Ltd, GlaxoSmithKline PLC, Novartis AG and Sanofi-Aventis SA.
It is not clear how many doses of vaccine will be available right away but the US would need 600 million doses to immunize everyone.
The panel struggled to keep a balance between getting limited supplies of vaccine to people who need it the most urgently and making sure that there was enough demand for it.
In the past, influenza vaccines have been thrown away at the end of the flu season because people lost interest in being vaccinated.
The US government has taken delivery of 20 million doses of a vaccine against the new strain, has ordered 195 million doses and should be ready to start an immunization campaign in October, said Robin Robinson of the US Department of Health and Human Services.
Data from human trials of the new vaccine, which have just begun, will not be available until late September, officials said.
A(H1N1) swine flu is now so widespread that the WHO has stopped counting individual cases. Health experts are afraid it could worsen, especially when the Northern Hemisphere’s influenza season starts in the autumn.
Fiore also released new CDC data showing that obese people do not have an especially high risk of death or complications from swine flu, as some earlier studies had suggested.
Fiore said the working group was assuming that people will need two doses of vaccine to be fully protected, but the clinical trials are also looking at this issue.
Seven people sustained mostly minor injuries in an airplane fire in South Korea, authorities said yesterday, with local media suggesting the blaze might have been caused by a portable battery stored in the overhead bin. The Air Busan plane, an Airbus A321, was set to fly to Hong Kong from Gimhae International Airport in southeastern Busan, but caught fire in the rear section on Tuesday night, the South Korean Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said. A total of 169 passengers and seven flight attendants and staff were evacuated down inflatable slides, it said. Authorities initially reported three injuries, but revised the number
A colossal explosion in the sky, unleashing energy hundreds of times greater than the Hiroshima bomb. A blinding flash nearly as bright as the sun. Shockwaves powerful enough to flatten everything for miles. It might sound apocalyptic, but a newly detected asteroid nearly the size of a football field now has a greater than 1 percent chance of colliding with Earth in about eight years. Such an impact has the potential for city-level devastation, depending on where it strikes. Scientists are not panicking yet, but they are watching closely. “At this point, it’s: ‘Let’s pay a lot of attention, let’s
UNDAUNTED: Panama would not renew an agreement to participate in Beijing’s Belt and Road project, its president said, proposing technical-level talks with the US US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday threatened action against Panama without immediate changes to reduce Chinese influence on the canal, but the country’s leader insisted he was not afraid of a US invasion and offered talks. On his first trip overseas as the top US diplomat, Rubio took a guided tour of the canal, accompanied by its Panamanian administrator as a South Korean-affiliated oil tanker and Marshall Islands-flagged cargo ship passed through the vital link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. However, Rubio was said to have had a firmer message in private, telling Panama that US President Donald Trump
CHEER ON: Students were greeted by citizens who honked their car horns or offered them food and drinks, while taxi drivers said they would give marchers a lift home Hundreds of students protesting graft they blame for 15 deaths in a building collapse on Friday marched through Serbia to the northern city of Novi Sad, where they plan to block three Danube River bridges this weekend. They received a hero’s welcome from fellow students and thousands of local residents in Novi Said after arriving on foot in their two-day, 80km journey from Belgrade. A small red carpet was placed on one of the bridges across the Danube that the students crossed as they entered the city. The bridge blockade planned for yesterday is to mark three months since a huge concrete construction
RSS