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The CDC released early estimates of the influenza vaccine effectiveness (VE) today. Many of us saw the report circulating that the VE was 23% overall. But if you happen to be 18-49 years old, it’s only 12%.

He roamed the University of Cincinnati campus with a loaded gun. When his rage overflowed, the brainy microbiology major would open fire inside empty buildings, visualizing a wall clock or other object as a person who had done him wrong. By the mid-1970s, Bruce Ivins had earned his doctorate and was a promising researcher at the University of North Carolina. By outward appearances, he was a charming eccentric, odd but disarming. Inside, he still smoldered with resentment, and he saw a new outlet for it. Several years earlier, a Cincinnati student had turned him down for a date. He had...

Erin Brodwin Januaty 5, 2015This CDC map shows the percentage of visits to outpatient providers that are for flu-like symptoms. States with "high" activity (up to 6%) are shown in red; states with "low" activity (2% or less) are shown in green. Everyone around you seems to be coughing and sneezing, and all you can think is, I should have gotten a flu shot. Good news is, it's not too late. Simply getting vaccinated — albeit late in the game and with an imperfect vaccine — will still dramatically reduce your chances of getting sick or infecting someone around you....

Isn’t there supposed to be a separation of cult and state? Mindfulness is a New Age kind of meditation that focuses on the present moment “non-judgmentally,” tracing its origins to Buddhism. The growing phenomenon was the subject of a 60 Minutes segment on Sunday, for which May and other fans of the practice were interviewed.The segment featured Rep. Tim Ryan (D., Ohio), a so-called “rock star among mindfulness evangelists” who earmarked nearly $1 million to teach mindfulness to preschool students in his district. The $982,000 project provided deep breathing exercises, and “Peace Corners” for kids in Youngstown, Ohio. I’m sure...

News.com.au: Patients’ pain ends Ebola vaccine trial in Switzerland 3 minutes ago "A CLINICAL trial of an Ebola vaccine has finished early after some patients started complaining of joint pain. The trial was stopped a week early in all 59 volunteers “as a measure of precaution”, the University of …"

One shot or two? Many questions unresolved in Ebola vaccine race 2 hours ago "Administering two vaccines, one after the other, would almost certainly give far greater protection than a single shot against a deadly virus that has killed…

Trials of a vaccine against Ebola show that it is safe and able to trigger an immune response against the virus In the first results from tests on an experimental Ebola vaccine, researchers at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) report for the first time Wednesday that the shot is safe and that it leads to an immune response among healthy volunteers. The vaccine, developed by the National Institutes of Health and GlaxoSmithKline, was tested in 20 participants in the US at the NIH Clinical Center in Bethesda. “This tells us that this is kind of a...

An experimental Ebola vaccine appears safe and triggered signs of immune protection in the first 20 volunteers to test it, U.S. researchers reported Wednesday. The vaccine is designed to spur the immune system's production of anti-Ebola antibodies, and people developed them within four weeks of getting the shots at the National Institutes of Health. Half of the test group received a higher-dose shot, and those people produced more antibodies, said the study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Some people also developed a different set of virus-fighting immune cells, named T cells, the study found.

Canada has launched a clinical trial of an experimental Ebola vaccine developed at its national microbiology laboratory and expects to have the results in early 2015, the government said on Friday. The experimental vaccine, known as VSV-EBOV, was developed over several years at the laboratory in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and has shown promising results in animal research. The trial will use a small group of volunteers in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and will complement other tests of the vaccine.

Scientists have demonstrated for the first time that a single-dose, needleless Ebola vaccine given to primates through their noses and lungs protected them against infection for at least 21 weeks.

The deadly EV-D68 enterovirus epidemic, which struck thousands of kids this fall, was likely propelled through America by President Barack ObamaÂ’s decision to allow tens of thousands of Central Americans across the Texas border, according to a growing body of genetic and statistical evidence. The evidence includes admissions from top health officials that the epidemic included multiple strains of the virus, and that it appeared simultaneously in multiple independent locations. The question can be settled if federal researchers study the genetic fingerprint of the EV-D68 viruses that first hit kids in Colorado, Missouri and Illinois to see if they are...

A Bristol mother is upset after she says her baby was denied a flu vaccination, even though the health department had flu shots on the shelf. When Annie Howard took her 14-month-old son to get his flu shot last week, she ran into what she calls a big problem. "My child is being denied the vaccination outright, denied the vaccination because we have insurance. That baffles me," she says. Howard's physician ran out of the preservative-free vaccination for infants, so she made an appointment at the Sullivan County Health Department. "I called asking them if they have the infant vaccination,...

LONDON: One million doses of an Ebola vaccine will be produced by the end of 2015, the World Health Organization has announced. Vaccines, "several hundred thousand" of which will be produced in the first half of the year would be initially made available to front line health workers in West Africa as early as by December 2014. Dr Marie Paule Kieny, WHO assistant director-general, said: "While we hope that the massive response, which has been put in place will have an impact on the epidemic, it is still prudent to prepare to have as much vaccine available if they are...

GALVESTON, Tex. — Almost a decade ago, scientists from Canada and the United States reported that they had created a vaccine that was 100 percent effective in protecting monkeys against the Ebola virus. The results were published in a respected journal, and health officials called them exciting. The researchers said tests in people might start within two years, and a product could potentially be ready for licensing by 2010 or 2011. It never happened. The vaccine sat on a shelf. Only now, with nearly 5,000 people dead from Ebola and an epidemic raging out of control in West Africa, is...

The Kenya Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Health Commission has criticised the Government’s planned nation-wide Tetanus vaccination campaign. The statement has expressed deep concern regarding the vaccinations. It says that the campaign leaves many questions unanswered hence the alarm. This is contained in a media statement released by the Catholic Health Commission of Kenya currently meeting at St Patrick’s Pastoral Centre, Kabula in Bungoma. The statement is co-signed by Bishop Paul Kariuki Njiru of Embu Diocese with his counterpart, Bishop Joseph Mbatia of Nyahururu on behalf of the Commisssion of the Bishops' Conference. The Commission includes 24 health facility managers drawn...

The empirical evidence of an airborne Ebola Strain is overwhelming Hat Tip GWP - Patrick Sawyer was the American businessman, who contracted Ebola while working in Liberia, then collapsed after he got off a plane to Nigeria and died July 25. He was the first patient in Nigeria with the Ebola virus. The Nigerian authorities have refused to release the names of other passengers on the plane with Mr. Sawyer, or notify the media of their status.

U.S. Army warns of potential 'airborne' Ebola Virus could be transmitted by means other than contact NEW YORK – While Centers for Disease Control and World Health Organization officials continue to insist Ebola cannot be transmitted by air from one person to another, an Army manual clearly warns the virus could be an airborne threat in certain circumstances. The handbook published by the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, USAMRID, titled “USAMRID’s Medical Management of Biological Casualties Handbook,” is now in its seventh edition. The most recent edition was published in 2011, with more than 100,000 copies distributed...

Kevin LoriaOctober 6, 2014 The idea that Ebola could go airborne is terrifying. Once you are infected, few diseases are more likely to kill you — and death by hemorrhagic fever, diarrhea and vomiting often accompanied by bleeding and organ failure, sounds particularly awful. At present it's hard to get infected — healthcare workers and family members caring for victims are at highest risk — but that would change if the virus were to mutate so that it could be transmitted through the air while keeping its present lethality. That's a nightmare scenario. But it's more the stuff of bad...

Bloomberg - link and title only.

<p>Muslim burial practices are being blamed for the spread of Ebola.</p> <p>Remains of Secretary General of The Nigeria Supreme General for Islamic Affairs and Seriki of Egbaland, Alhaji Lateeef Adegbite at his burial in 2012.</p> <p>Islam requires family members to personally wash the corpses of loved ones from head to toe. This practise is putting more Africans at risk to catch the disease that is spread by body fluids.</p>

The pitch was intriguing: U.S. health officials wanted to fast-track trials for an Ebola vaccine and sounded the call for volunteers. Charles Sullivan called up the hotline on a whim, figuring the National Institutes of Health already had filled its queue and wouldn’t need him. But he was accepted for three rounds of shots of a deactivated virus, a year’s worth of blood analysis and a $900 check for his trouble. The clinical trial went well, and the vaccine seemed promising. A decade later, the country is still waiting for a vaccine amid a worldwide Ebola outbreak, and Mr. Sullivan...

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has spent more than $39 million on obese lesbians, origami condoms, texting drunks, and dozens of other projects that could have been scrapped in favor of developing an Ebola vaccine. “Frankly, if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would’ve gone through clinical trials and would have been ready,” said NIH Director Francis Collins, blaming budget cuts for his agency’s failure to develop a vaccine for the deadly virus. However, the Washington Free Beacon has uncovered $39,643,352 worth...

Israeli drug companies, such as Teva, are pretty good at producing imitation drugs quickly. Teva was truly disruptive to big pharma companies, since they often feared blockbuster drugs going off patent as Teva was ready and waiting with a quality generic imitation. It’s not so surprising that what is bad for big pharma is good for the patient and the consumer, and now an Israeli biotech company named Protalix is ready to replenish supplies of the experimental Ebola vaccine, ZMapp. The disease has already claimed the lives of 3,944, predominantly in Africa, but in the U.S., there has been one...

A Chinese pharmaceutical firm that has links with the country's military has developed an experimental Ebola drug. It is hoping federal authorities will immediately grant its approval so it can be marketed the soonest. Sihuan Pharmaceutical Holdings Group Ltd developed the drug called JK-05, along with the Institute of Microbiological Epidemiology, a part of the Academy of Military Medical Sciences. It has been approved but only for emergency military purposes. Sihuan also admitted during an investor call last week it has yet to undergo clinical trials. The firm said it is working to have the tests started, but if possible...

The Ebola vaccine that Canada has developed has started its human clinical trials, Health Minister Rona Ambrose announced. Authorities will test the VSV-EBOV vaccine on a small group of people to assess its safety, determine the appropriate dosage and identify any side effects. So far, the vaccine has shown a 100 per cent success rate in animals, Ambrose said. A total of 20 vials of the experimental vaccine have been supplied for use in the trial. It was developed by scientists at the Public Health Agency of Canada's National Microbiology Laboratory (NML). The 20 healthy volunteers at the Walter Reed...

Officials began testing a Canadian-made Ebola vaccine on human volunteers in the United States Monday. The Walter Reed Army Institute of Research enlisted 39 healthy volunteers for the trial, and injected the first subject with the VSV-EBOV vaccine in phase 1 of testing Monday. Canada supplied 20 vials of the vaccine for the trial, which medical officials will be monitoring predominately throughout the phase 1 trial for safety, and also to determine proper dosage level. Officials divided the volunteers into three groups, the first of which received a low-dose of the vaccination and will need medical clearance from a safety...

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The first volunteer in a fast-tracked British safety trial of an experimental Ebola vaccine made by GlaxoSmithKline received the injection on Wednesday, trial organisers said. The candidate Ebola vaccine, which GSK co-developed with the U.S. National Institutes of Health, has also been given to 10 volunteers taking part in a similar separate trial in the United States, and so far there were no signs of any serious adverse reactions, doctors said. The vaccine being tested in the UK is designed to specifically target the Zaire strain of Ebola, the one circulating in the West Africa epidemic, the worst Ebola outbreak...

ob Schneider has learned the hard way that there's no way to inoculate yourself against an Internet backlash. State Farm Insurance has dropped an ad campaign featuring the "Deuce Bigalow" star in a reprisal of his "Richmeister" character -- a.k.a. the "making copies" guy -- from "Saturday Night Live." The decision stems not from an objection to rehashed humor from the mid-'90s, but to Schneider's outspoken stance against childhood vaccines. Along with former "View" co-host Jenny McCarthy, Schneider, who has lately been busy trying to revive his career with a spec sitcom, has been one of the most vocal celebrity...

September 26, 2014AFPGeneva (AFP) - Thousands of experimental Ebola vaccine doses from British GSK and US NewLink should be ready for use by early 2015 in countries affected by the epidemic, the World Health Organization said Friday. "If everything goes well, we may be able to begin using some of these vaccines in some of the affected countries at the very beginning of next year," said WHO assistant director general Marie-Paule Kieny. There is no licensed treatment or vaccine against the virus that has killed nearly 3,000 people in West Africa, and the UN health agency has endorsed rushing through...

As proof of their bravery, rebels fighting against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad are suspected of sabotaging a batch of measles vaccinations, leading to the deaths of up to 50 young children. If true, it's a new low in an especially discouraging chapter of modern history.LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - Dozens of infants in the rebel-held cities of Jarjanaz and Sinjar in Idlib province fell ill and died after being given the drugs. The causes of death has not yet been established. Officials reportedly suspect the vaccines may have been tampered with while left unguarded in a storage facility in...

At least 34 children have died in rebel-held Syria after being injected with contaminated measles vaccines, the rebel government said on Tuesday, warning that the deaths might be caused by saboteurs linked to the Assad regime. The death toll is expected to rise, with many children from eight towns in Idlib province, north-west Syria, still in intensive care on Tuesday night. ...

… The scale of the present outbreak, together with the fear and suffering it is causing, has resulted in a burst of scientific activity to find new treatments and vaccines. Some of these medicines look promising. But to contain the spread of Ebola, scientists and health officials will have to bypass many of the existing rules that govern the delivery of new drugs, and develop potential remedies with unprecedented speed. This strategy is being endorsed widely. In August experts from the WHO concluded that, provided certain conditions are met, it would be ethical to offer unproven, experimental treatments or methods...

A World Health Organization official says an Ebola vaccine developed in Canada may be the first to be approved for use, possibly before the year is out. Marie-Paule Kieny says data from the first safety studies in humans of two experimental vaccines should be available by November. She says if they are deemed safe to use, it could open the door initially for use in health-care workers tending the sick. One of the experimental vaccines was developed at Canada's National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg. The company which licensed that vaccine, NewLink Genetics, announced this week that it had received approval...

Britons are to be the first in the world to test a new vaccine against the deadly ebola virus. Altogether 60 healthy volunteers will be given the vaccine next month in a trial led by Oxford University scientists. If the vaccine performs as well in humans as in monkeys, the trial will be extended to 80 people in The Gambia and in Mali. The entire trial programme is being fast-tracked – subject to ethical approval – with the intention of using the vaccine in people at high risk in West Africa early next year. Latest figures show that more than...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE-AUGUST 27,2014 STATEMENT OF WILLIAM W. THOMPSON, Ph.D., REGARDING THE 2004 ARTICLE EXAMINING THE POSSIBILITY OF A RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MMR VACCINE AND AUTISM My name is William Thompson. I am a Senior Scientist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where I have worked since 1998. I regret that my coauthors and I omitted statistically significant information in our 2004 article published in the journal Pediatrics. The omitted data suggested that African American males who received the MMR vaccine before age 36 months were at increased risk for autism. Decisions were made regarding which findings to report...

Dr. Leslie Lobel is an Israeli virologist conducting cutting edge research on a cure for Ebola -- a cure he believes is three to five years away. As reported in the Times of Israel: Unlike many people, Dr. Leslie Lobel has not been shocked to hear about the current Ebola epidemic in West Africa, the largest ever recorded since the virus’s discovery in 1976 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (then Zaire). A Ben-Gurion University of the Negev virologist and a leader in the search for a cure for the devastating disease, Lobel had been predicting such an outbreak. (snip)...

New York - It's an eye-catching angle in the story of an experimental treatment for Ebola: The drug comes from tobacco plants that were turned into living pharmaceutical factories. Using plants this way, sometimes called "pharming" can produce complex and valuable proteins for medicines. That approach, studied for about 20 years, hasn't caught on widely in the pharmaceutical industry. But some companies and academic labs are pursuing it to create medicines and vaccines against such targets as HIV, cancer, the deadly Marburg virus and norovirus, known for causing outbreaks of stomach bug on cruise ships, as well as Ebola. While...

Canada will donate doses of its experimental Ebola vaccine to the international community and the World Health Organization will help determine who receives it, a federal official says. The Canadian government expects to donate 800 to 1,000 doses of the experimental Ebola vaccine developed at the National Microbiology Laboratory. On Wednesday, Heritage Minister Shelly Glover, who represents Winnipeg, where the National Microbiology Laboratory is located, said the WHO, advised by experts, will decide how to strike a balance on who gets the vaccine Canada offers to the international community. "This is a decision that will be made by experts and...

The Public Health Agency of Canada and the federal government have shared more details about an experimental Ebola vaccine that will be donated to help fight the current outbreak in West Africa. Dr. Gary Kobinger, chief of special pathogens at the agency, and Heritage Minister Shelly Glover shared more information about the VSV-EBOV vaccine at a news conference Wednesday afternoon. Here's what we know so far about the made-in-Canada vaccine. How many doses will be sent? Canada will be donating between 800 to 1,000 doses of the vaccine. A small amount of the vaccine will remain behind, in the event...

Miguel Pajares, a Spanish priest who contracted the Ebola virus in Liberia, has died of the disease. He was the first European Ebola patient to be flown back to Europe for treatment. The 75-year-old Roman Catholic priest has died in a Madrid hospital, Spanish authorities confirmed on Tuesday. Pajares, who contracted the Ebola virus in Liberia - one of the hardest hit countries in the current outbreak - was airlifted from Liberia on August 7. He had been working for an NGO in the Liberian capital Monrovia. Pajares was one of only three people who have been treated with an...

A clinical trial of an experimental vaccine against the deadly Ebola virus is set to start shortly, according to British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline, which is co-developing the product with U.S. scientists. The world's worst outbreak of Ebola has killed nearly 1,000 people in West Africa and the disease could continue spreading for months, increasing pressure on researchers to accelerate their work on new medical interventions. There is no proven cure or vaccine to prevent infection with Ebola and the scale of the current outbreak has prompted the World Health Organisation to declare it an international health emergency. GSK's experimental vaccine has...

Clinical trials of a preventative vaccine for the Ebola virus made by British pharma company GlaxoSmithKline may begin next month and made available by 2015, the World Health Organization said on Saturday. "We are targeting September for the start of clinical trials, first in the United States and certainly in African countries, since that's where we have the cases," Jean-Marie Okwo Bele, the WHO's head of vaccines and immunisation, told French radio. He said he was optimistic about making the vaccine commercially available. "We think that if we start in September, we could already have results by the end of...

J.I. Rodale, the godfather of the locavore trend, was a paranoid anti-vaxxer, tooOn June 7, 1971, Jerome Irving Rodale appeared on "The Dick Cavett Show." The elder statesman of a growing organic food trend, he gushed about the health benefits of his diet, boasting that he “never felt better” and that he “decided to live to a hundred.” But after a commercial break, as Cavett interviewed his second guest, what sounded like a loud snore rose from Rodale’s end of the couch. The audience twittered, thinking that he was pulling a prank. But Cavett knew. When he looked over at...

In a widely shared Onion article from a few days ago, scientists "announced" that an Ebola vaccine was still 50 white people away. This was a jab at pharmaceutical companies, who, cynics think, will only set their R&D wheels in motion if there's money on the horizon. Hundreds of poor Africans die? No drugs. Old rich men can't have sex? All the drugs. That's not entirely true, of course. It does take a big pharmaceutical company to get a vaccine approved for use in humans, but drug companies aren't evil—at least not irrationally so. They tend to throw resources into...

The FDA letter said that since 2011, the company has repeatedly discarded batches of vaccine because of bacterial counts that registered above specified limits. It noted that 21 per cent of the plant's production in 2014 could not be released to the market because of the problem. "We have 30 days to review and respond to the findings noted in their report and we are committed to doing so by August 4, 2014," said the email from Michelle Smolenaars Hunter, communications manager for GSK Canada. GSK expects to provide between 28 million and 33 million doses of flu vaccine to...

In a case weighing the government’s ability to require vaccination against the individual right to refuse it, a federal judge has upheld a New York City policy that bars unimmunized children from public school when another student has a vaccine-preventable disease. Citing a 109-year-old Supreme Court ruling that gives states broad power in public health matters, Judge William F. Kuntz II of Federal District Court in Brooklyn ruled against three families who claimed that their right to free exercise of religion was violated when their children were kept from school, sometimes for a month at a time, because of the...

Dr. Diane Harper was a leading expert responsible for the Phase II and Phase III safety and effectiveness studies which secured the approval of the human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccines, Gardasil™ and Cervarix™. Dr. Harper also authored many of the published, scholarly papers about the vaccines. She is now the latest in a long string of experts who are pressing the red alert button on the devastating consequences and irrelevancy of these vaccines. Dr. Harper made her surprising confession at the 4th International Converence on Vaccination which took place in Reston, Virginia. Her speech, which was originally intended to promote...

It’s a breakthrough that could help thousands of American soldiers returning from dangerous deployments. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology believe they may have discovered a way to create a vaccine that could prevent post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). “What it’s going to do is that they’ll still have perfectly strong memories of the event. They just won’t have the bad health consequences,” said Ki Goosens, an assistant professor of neuroscience with the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. The key is a lesser-known hormone produced by the stomach called ghrelin. “One of the really interesting things about ghrelin that was...

Emergency doses of a meningitis vaccine not approved for use in the U.S. may soon be on the way to Princeton University to halt an outbreak of the potentially deadly infection that has sickened seven students since March. Government health officials said Friday they have agreed to import Bexsero, a vaccine licensed only in Europe and Australia that protects against meningitis B, a strain not covered by the shots recommended for college students in the U.S.