H1N1 remains relatively mild as vaccine production advances
CDC says most U.S. children who died ad pre-existing conditions; WHO pressures companies to donate 10% of their swine flu vaccine production to the developing world
The H1N1 swine-flu virus is sickening many people around the world, but so far is not becoming more virulent, health experts said late last week, giving a bit of breathing room to pharmaceutical companies and officials rushing to deliver a vaccine. “The good news is that so far, everything that we’ve seen, both here and abroad, shows that the virus has not changed to become more deadly,” said Thomas Frieden, the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). “That means that although it may affect lots of people, most people will not be severely ill.” He cautioned, though, that “the H1N1 influenza and influenza generally is unpredictable.”
Wall Street Journal’s Betsy McKay and Gordon Fairclough write that a CDC study released last Thursday showed that most of those U.S. children who have died of the new H1N1 flu were at least five years old, and 67 percent had high-risk medical conditions, predominantly neurodevelopmental disorders such as epilepsy or cerebral palsy. Some otherwise healthy children who died had bacterial infections, the study found, warning doctors to be on the lookout for them so they could be treated quickly.
Health officials welcomed early evidence that one dose of the new H1N1 vaccine may be sufficient to protect some people from infection. If that finding bears out, public health authorities would be able to stretch limited supplies of vaccine to a larger portion of the population.
Their assumption has been that most people would need two doses to build enough immunity to the new virus. World-wide, the new flu has been confirmed to have infected more than 209,438 people, and at least 2,185 have died, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
McKay and Fairclough write that Chinese vaccine maker Sinovac Biotech won approval from China’s drug regulator for commercial production of that country’s first H1N1 swine-flu vaccine, and said it is effective with a single standard dose. Novartis also said that its H1N1 swine-flu vaccine also prompted a strong immune response after a single dose in a pilot trial. The company said that two doses provided better protection, but that the study suggested one dose could be enough to protect adults against swine flu.
“While we do not yet have full details, these appear to be encouraging results,” Marie-Paule Kieny, the WHO’s vaccine research director, said of the findings.
U.S. officials are hoping for similar results from their own clinical trials. The Chinese vaccine is similar to
