Flu round-upPublic health scientists lobby to put children at the head of innoculation line

As scientists around the world burn the midnight oil in search of an avian flu vaccine, policymakers are having an equally hard time catching sleep. If and when a epidemic outbreak occurs, they will have to make their own versions of Sophie’s Choice and decide whom should have first priority in a national innoculation scheme. Making things worse is that the choice will in large part be between two equally vulnerable segments of society: the very young, who are most likely to transmit the virus but survive, and the very old, who are almost certain to die without a vaccine but pose much less of a risk of infecting others. Current strategy is to try and do both, but a new study published recently in the journal PLoS medicine calls the entire approach into question. Infants, they found, are not as likely to infect others as was previously believed, nor do the elderly benefit as much as adults from the vaccine under certain circumstances. “During some flu pandemics, the mortality rate among the elderly is hardly higher than during nonpandemic years.”

The PloS study suggests that, for minor strains at least, innoculating other age groups, especially school-aged children, might be the most effective approach. “This severs the transmission chain,” said professor Lauren Ancel Meyers of the University of Texas at Austin, thereby indirectly protecting the old. Last year, scientists showed that if you vaccinate about 60 percent of U.S. schoolchildren, flu deaths among the elderly would fall to 6,600 from the typical 34,000. For tougher strains, however, an analysis of transmission chains found that the elderly should be the first to be vaccinated. “Highly contagious strains can find their way around this buffer of immunized schoolkids,” said Hoffman.

-read more in Sharon Begley’s Wall Street Journal report; read more in this Science Daily report