FDA Approves Vaccines for 2009 H1N1 Influenza Virus
Approval Provides Important Tool to Fight Pandemic

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced today that it has approved four vaccines against the 2009 H1N1 influenza virus. The vaccines will be distributed nationally after the initial lots become available, which is expected within the next four weeks.
“Today’s approval is good news for our nation’s response to the 2009 H1N1 influenza virus,” said Commissioner of Food and Drugs Margaret A. Hamburg, M.D. “This vaccine will help protect individuals from serious illness and death from influenza.”

When we hear of illness outbreaks, we often also hear of school closings. This is done with the hope of containing contagious illnesses and minimizing the spread and impact. However, with a new school year dawning in the United States, this may not be the case with regards to the H1N1 virus, the so-called swine flu.
There are a lot of issues to take into account when schools are closed en masse. Parents must scramble for child care, stay home and lose income, or leave their children unattended if they’re desperate enough. This can have a domino effect for the families, …read more

Are you ready for this? With the warnings we’ve all received over the last few months about swine flu, medical professionals are now saying that the disease might not be as lethal as originally thought. In fact, it may be up to 40 times less fatal.

The latest figures show that “probability of dying from the pandemic flu strain may be 1 in 10,000 cases and possibly as low as 1 in 100,000.” It’s still a dangerous disease, to be sure, but probably not as deadly as the medical world once believed.
Whenever I hear reports like this (that …read more

The sky isn’t falling in. We’re not all going to be wearing space suits to stay healthy. And no, we don’t have to panic, which is what some people may do when they read headlines such as the one above. That being said, the fact that the World Health Organization is considering raising the pandemic level to 6 – the highest level – is newsworthy.
Some people feel that pandemic automatically means something like the Spanish flu of the early 1900s. That’s not so. A pandemic, by definition, is an illness that has been found to be spreading beyond local areas, …read more

With the medical community on edge wondering when the next severe pandemic will hit, governments across the world are making preparations to deal with what may happen. There are people who feel that these preparations are akin to Chicken Little and the sky falling in, but it really does seem to be a good idea to be prepared. Because something is going to happen; we just don’t know when and what, and to what severity.
Part of this preparation is making sure that the world has enough vaccines against the flu. Earlier this month, the United States FDA has approved a …read more

Hearing things like “pandemic” and “outbreak” are scary enough when it comes to news about the swine flu. But how about news that the swine flu has been taking down people in the very prime of their lives? People who are 20s adn 30s instead of the elderly and small children?

Dr. Sanjay Gupta from CNN is in Mexico City right now and addressed this question. He acknowledged that typically flu or other illness will attack people with a weakened immune system, but said of the swine flu that “it’s the immune system in that reaction to the …read more