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I love L.A., but every so often I come across something that makes me think maybe people here really are crazier than average. Take this horrifying Sept. 24 Los Angeles Times story about Christine Maggiore, an influential HIV-positive activist who believes that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, isn’t infectious, shouldn’t be treated with “toxic” anti-retroviral drugs like AZT and certainly needn’t prevent HIV-positive mothers like herself from breastfeeding. In May, Maggiore’s three-year-old daughter Eliza died of AIDS-related pneumonia. Her regular doctors were two pediatricians popular with the Hollywood crowd: Paul Fleiss, the anti-circumcision crusader and tax-evading father of Hollywood madam Heidi...

ATLANTA, June 30 - To reduce the rising number of whooping cough cases in this country, a panel advising the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended Thursday that a new booster vaccine be routinely given to all 11- and 12-year-olds. During a two-day meeting here, the 15-member panel, known as the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, also strengthened recommendations on vaccines against hepatitis B and chickenpox. The booster vaccine for whooping cough, or pertussis, is needed because immunity to it wanes 5 to 10 years after the initial vaccination. But an additional shot will not be needed because the...

When Jeanna Giese, 15, arrived at Children's Hospital of Wisconsin last October with rapidly worsening neurological symptoms, the fact that she had handled a bat a month earlier raised the possibility that she had rabies. Dr. Rodney E. Willoughby Jr., who examined Jeanna, did not think it was likely. But as a pediatric infectious disease specialist, he called the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to seek the agency's help in performing rabies tests. Dr. Willoughby told the C.D.C. rabies expert that over a five-day period Jeanna had developed fatigue, tingling and numbness in her left hand, double vision, an...

Whooping Cough Outbreak Communities throughout the U.S. are experiencing whooping cough (pertussis) outbreaks - the worst in 40 years. If the school nurse or the health department informs you that there is a pertussis outbreak in your school or community, you may need to call your pediatrician. The school or health department will tell you if your child was directly exposed and requires antibiotics. Health departments across the country are acting quickly to prevent the spread of pertussis, so your cooperation in contacting your pediatrician is crucial. Please follow the instruction of the health department. The care of children in...

An experimental vaccine can reduce both the incidence and the severity of shingles by more than half, doctors reported yesterday, in a development that could spare hundreds of thousands of elderly Americans from an extremely painful disease. The effectiveness of the vaccine was determined in an unusually large clinical trial involving more than 38,500 people over the age of 60, the group most prone to shingles, a skin and nerve infection. "I think the results are quite clinically significant," said Dr. Michael N. Oxman, the leader of the study, which is being published today in The New England Journal of...

Dr. Maurice R. Hilleman, a microbiologist who developed vaccines for mumps, measles, chickenpox, pneumonia, meningitis and other diseases, saving tens of millions of lives, died yesterday at a hospital in Philadelphia. He was 85. The cause was cancer, said a son-in-law, Greg Slamowitz. Raised on a farm in Montana, Dr. Hilleman credited much of his success to his boyhood work with chickens, whose eggs form the foundation of so many vaccines. Much of modern preventive medicine is based on Dr. Hilleman's work, though he never received the public recognition of Salk, Sabin or Pasteur. He is credited with having developed...

For six months last year, Jill Wilson had a persistent cough. "It was so harsh and deep that I broke ribs," she said. Various medical specialists told Ms. Wilson, an otherwise fit 60-year-old, that she had bronchitis, asthma, allergies and perhaps even a serious lung disorder known as interstitial pulmonary fibrosis. "All wrong," said Ms. Wilson, a retired president of a real estate management company who lives in San Antonio. It wasn't until she saw an infectious disease expert that Ms. Wilson learned that she had pertussis, or whooping cough. Commonly thought of as a childhood illness controlled by routine...

Responding to growing concerns about its ability to monitor the side effects of vaccines, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention decided last week to separate its national immunization program, which advocates vaccination, from its vaccine safety branch, which monitors the potential risks of the vaccines. The action comes at a time of increasing public outcry over the government's handling of drug safety issues. Earlier this month, the Food and Drug Administration announced that it would create a board to advise it on drug complications and to warn patients about unsafe drugs. Critics of the disease-control agency have argued for...

The Chiron Corporation said yesterday that it had received a warning letter from the Food and Drug Administration demanding more information about the company's plans to fix widespread sanitary problems at its flu vaccine factory in Liverpool, England. The letter comes after an inspection of the plant by the F.D.A. in October, during which the agency found many problems, including bacterial contamination and lax quality-control procedures. Citing similar findings, British regulators suspended Chiron's manufacturing license for three months in early October, eliminating half of the United States' expected supply of flu shots for this winter. This week, the British regulators...

In ordering a new $877 million anthrax vaccine last month, the federal government said it was a major step toward creating a "bioshield" to protect Americans from germ warfare. But delivering that protection may be difficult: the vaccine is unproven in humans, the maker has legal and accounting troubles, and health officials are not prepared to distribute the vaccine quickly if it is needed. Bush administration officials, as well as the top executives at VaxGen, the manufacturer in California, say they are confident they can fulfill their promise. "This program needs to be a success for all of us -...

The threat, not well understood outside the medical community, has been rendered with authoritative starkness since news broke of the flu vaccine shortage. Lives are at risk. Every year, we are told, influenza kills multitudes of vulnerable people, and the death toll is often repeated: 36,000 die annually in the United States alone. The lethal efficiency of the flu has come as a surprise to many, it turns out, because almost no one is ever officially classified as dying of influenza. There is no public national accounting of who had influenza listed on their death certificate. But of the roughly...

A committee of experts meeting in Atlanta will debate today whether the government can afford to pay for a vaccine that could save the lives of nearly 3,000 people, many of them teenagers, from deaths caused over the next decade by a virulent bacterial meningitis. The price of the new vaccine will most likely be $80 a dose. Vaccinating all 40 million people from age 11 to 20, as some experts have suggested, would cost the government $3.5 billion next year. That is more than $1 million a life spared, far more than health officials are normally willing to spend....

Wyeth Pharmaceuticals doesn't make flu shots anymore, and it doesn't miss them one bit. For two decades, Wyeth made injectable influenza vaccine at a plant in Marietta, Pa. For the winter of 2002-03, it made 21 million doses in a labor-intensive, time-crunched process and shipped them to clinics and doctors' offices early in the fall. But it turned out a lot fewer people wanted it. Flu vaccine can't be saved from year to year. So, sometime the next spring Wyeth threw away 7 million unsold doses, for a loss of $30 million. It then quit making flu shots. It eventually...

This article was reported by Denise Grady, Lizette Alvarez, Gardiner Harris and Andrew Pollack and was written by Ms. Grady. Scene by disheartening scene, the spectacle of a severe shortage of flu vaccine is unfolding around the country. Last week, elderly and chronically ill people waited in line for hours to get flu shots; some were turned away. One died, after hitting her head when she passed out or fell while waiting. Price gougers demanded $800 for $60 vials of vaccine. States threatened to fine or jail doctors and nurses who gave shots to anyone not in the high-risk groups....

For the first time, researchers say, a vaccine against malaria has shown that it can save children from infection or death. The vaccine, tested on thousands of children in Mozambique, was hardly perfect: It protected them from catching the disease only about 30 percent of the time and prevented it from becoming life-threatening only about 58 percent of the time. But because malaria kills more than a million people a year, 700,000 of them children, even partial protection would be a public health victory. The disease, caused by a parasite carried by mosquitoes, is found in 90 countries, and drug-resistant...

The Justice Department has started an investigation of the Chiron Corporation, whose British factory where flu vaccine was being manufactured was shut down last week, depriving the United States of nearly half the flu shots it was expecting for this winter. Chiron, a California biotechnology company, said yesterday that it had received a grand jury subpoena from the United States attorney's office in Manhattan requesting documents related to its flu vaccine and to the suspension of manufacturing at its Liverpool factory by British regulators. The company, which said it would cooperate with the investigation, provided no further information and the...

BANGKOK, Sept. 29 - With Thai and international experts confirming the first probable human-to-human transmission of a virulent strain of avian influenza in this country, public health officials around the world are facing major hurdles as they try to prepare for a possible pandemic. Scientists say they cannot predict how quickly, if at all, the strain may develop the ability to spread easily among people, and whether it will remain as lethal as it has proven so far. The strain, A(H5N1), has killed 30 of the 42 Southeast Asians it infected in the past year, and millions of chickens and...

REUTERS New evidence rebuts a controversial theory that the AIDS pandemic was touched off by contaminated polio vaccines used in the 1950's in what was then the Belgian Congo, American scientists reported yesterday. The theory holds that the vaccines were tainted with chimpanzee tissue that contained an ancestor of H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. But in a study published yesterday in the journal Nature, a team of researchers led by Dr. Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona said it had discovered a new strain of chimpanzee virus near Kisangani in the Democratic Republic of Congo that is very...

A federal judge ruled Jan. 7 that the Defense Department could again legally administer anthrax immunizations to troops. That same day, DoD personnel chief Dr. David S.C. Chu noted in a departmentwide memorandum that military commanders "should immediately resume the anthrax vaccination program." The department's anthrax vaccine immunization program had been in hiatus since Dec. 23, after an injunction granted the previous day by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia caused DoD to suspend the program. The department, Chu wrote in the memo, "remains convinced that the AVIP complies with all legal requirements, and there is now...

Anthrax Vaccine Safe, Effective, Health Chief Says By Jim Garamone American Forces Press Service WASHINGTON -- With almost a million shots given, the anthrax immunization is proving to be one of the safest vaccination program on record, said Dr. Sue Bailey, assistant secretary of defense for health affairs. “The vaccine that we are administering to our troops for protection against anthrax is effective and entirely safe,” Bailey said during a Pentagon interview. She said service members are experiencing few serious adverse reactions from the shots. The most recent reports show only 14 reactions were serious enough that the service...