Govt calls for volunteers to test swine flu shots

July 22, 2009 By LAURAN NEERGAARD , AP Medical Writer

(AP) -- The race is on: The government and vaccine makers are seeking thousands of volunteers, from babies to the elderly, to roll up their sleeves for the first swine flu shots - to test whether a new vaccine really will protect against this novel virus before its expected rebound in the fall.

On Wednesday the National Institutes of Health tapped a network of medical centers around the country to begin a series of studies, with the first shots to go into the arms of healthy adults, of any age, in early August. If there are no immediate safety concerns, such as allergic reactions, testing quickly would begin in children as young as 6 months.

The tests, plus additional research from vaccine manufacturers, are key as the government decides whether to offer vaccine to millions of Americans starting in mid-October - assuming that enough is produced by then - still a big question as the vaccine is proving hard to manufacture. Health authorities in other countries are looking to the U.S. studies, too, as they make their own plans.

It's crucial to test all ages. Unlike regular winter flu that is most dangerous to people over 65 and under 2, this new swine flu that has quickly spread around the globe seems to disproportionately target school-age children, teenagers and young adults.

Will the results come in time? "It's going to be very, very close," Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of NIH's National Institute of Allergy and , told The Associated Press.

"We are racing to provide them as much information as we possibly can," said Dr. Karen Kotloff of the University of Maryland School of Medicine, who is helping to lead the NIH study. She said doctors and other health workers already were asking about enrolling in the study themselves.

It promises to be a confusing fall, as doctors struggle to administer vaccine against the regular winter flu and tell patients to stay tuned for when and if they can later return for another shot or two of swine flu vaccine.

The test plan: All volunteers will get two swine flu shots, given 21 days apart. By early September, blood tests should show how much immune protection the initial dose triggered - and if a low-dose shot worked or a higher dose was needed. It will take another month to get information on the second shot.

Will parents want to enroll very young children? The NIH chose study hospitals with experience in testing vaccines on the very young, and "it's not a radically different vaccine from what they already get anyway," Fauci said.

The new swine flu strain is part of the H1N1 family of influenza viruses. We're used to that family. Some human strain of H1N1 has been included in regular influenza vaccine for 33 years, Fauci said - and the seasonal flu vaccine has a safe record for all ages. Yet because its a unique H1N1 strain, with genes that originated in swine, scientists worry that it may be harder than usual for a vaccine to trigger protection.

The swine flu vaccine "falls somewhere between a completely new vaccine and a strain change we do every year without clinical trials," said Dr. John Treanor of the University of Rochester, a government vaccine adviser.

As for safety, the studies will track the typical vaccine side effects - redness, swelling, fever, allergic reactions - and any unexpected immediate reaction.

"We expect this vaccine to be no different than seasonal (flu) vaccine. It ought to be extremely safe," said Dr. William Schaffner, a vaccine specialist at Vanderbilt University.

But the studies won't be large enough to catch any very rare side effect. The last mass vaccination against a different swine flu, in the U.S. in 1976, was marred by reports of paralyzing Guillain-Barre syndrome. Scientists could never prove whether that link was real or coincidence, but all flu vaccine today comes with a warning about Guillain-Barre - and the government has pledged intense monitoring for rare reactions if mass swine flu vaccinations go forward.

Included in the NIH studies are vaccines made by France-based Sanofi-Pasteur and CSL Ltd. Also Wednesday, CSL began a much smaller study of its vaccine in Australia, where the company is based.

All five U.S. providers of - including Britain's GlaxoSmithKline, Swiss-based Novartis AG and maker of the only nasal-spray vaccine, Maryland-based MedImmune - also will conduct their own studies in several thousand more volunteers. Thursday, the Food and Drug Administration will review their testing plans.

The NIH's main study sites:

-University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore.

-University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa.

-Saint Louis University, St. Louis, Mo.

-Baylor College of Medicine, Houston.

-Children's Hospital Medical Center, Cincinnati.

-Emory University, Atlanta.

-Group Health Cooperative, Seattle.

-Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn.

Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Mo., and Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C., will partner with two sites for part of the research.

---

On the Net:

To search for "H1N1 influenza vaccine" trials: http://www.clinicaltrials.gov

©2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Filter


Move the slider to adjust rank threshold, so that you can hide some of the comments.


Display comments: newest first

brant
Jul 22, 2009

Rank: not rated yet
Does it come with Simian virus SV42?
Rank not rated yet
Related Stories
Relevant PhysicsForums posts
  • Is Everyday Technology Killing Us?
    createdFeb 08, 2012
  • Exercise and weight loss
    createdFeb 08, 2012
  • Why do we have head aches? Our brains can't feel anything.
    createdFeb 07, 2012
  • "The end of diseases" by David Agus, interview from Daily Show with Jon Stewart
    createdFeb 04, 2012
  • Oncolytic adenovirus
    createdFeb 04, 2012
  • Nutrition label stuffs and diets
    createdFeb 02, 2012
  • More from Physics Forums - Medical Sciences

More news stories

Complex wiring of the nervous system may rely on a just a handful of genes and proteins

Researchers at the Salk Institute have discovered a startling feature of early brain development that helps to explain how complex neuron wiring patterns are programmed using just a handful of critical genes. ...

Medicine & Health / Research

created 11 hours ago | popularity 4.9 / 5 (9) | comments 1 | with audio podcast

Team isolates nerve cells involved in storing long term memory and gene proteins associated with them

(Medical Xpress) -- A research team in Taiwan has succeeded in isolating two nerve cells in fruit fly brains that are believed to be the major players in allowing for the formation of long term memories. Furthermore, ...

Medicine & Health / Neuroscience

created 17 hours ago | popularity 5 / 5 (4) | comments 2 | with audio podcast report

Seeing colors in music, tasting flavors in shapes may happen in life's early months

Famed violinist Itzhak Perlman sees a deep forest green whenever he plays a B-flat on his Stradivarius' G string. The A on the E string is red.

Medicine & Health / Psychology & Psychiatry

created 18 hours ago | popularity 4.5 / 5 (2) | comments 2 | with audio podcast

Both maternal and paternal age linked to autism

Older maternal and paternal age are jointly associated with having a child with autism, according to a recently published study led by researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth).

Medicine & Health / Psychology & Psychiatry

created 15 hours ago | popularity 4.3 / 5 (3) | comments 0 | with audio podcast

New understanding of DNA repair could eventually lead to cancer therapy

A research group in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry at the University of Alberta is hoping its latest discovery could one day be used to develop new therapies that target certain types of cancers.

Medicine & Health / Cancer

created 14 hours ago | popularity 4.8 / 5 (6) | comments 0 | with audio podcast


Anonymous knocks CIA website offline (Update)

The website of the Central Intelligence Agency was inaccessible on Friday after the hacker group Anonymous claimed to have knocked it offline.

New error-correcting codes guarantee the fastest possible rate of data transmission

Error-correcting codes are one of the triumphs of the digital age. They’re a way of encoding information so that it can be transmitted across a communication channel — such as an optical fiber o ...

Google users warned of threat to smartphone wallets

Users of Google smartphone wallets were being warned on Friday that there is a way to crack pass codes intended to thwart thieves from going on illicit shopping sprees.

Humans may have helped the decline of African rainforests 3000 years ago

(PhysOrg.com) -- Large areas of rainforests in Central Africa mysteriously disappeared over three thousand years ago, to be replaced by savannas. The prevailing theory has been that the cause was a change ...

New power source discovered

(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and RMIT University have made a breakthrough in energy storage and power generation.

Small modular reactor design could be a 'SUPERSTAR'

(PhysOrg.com) -- Though most of today's nuclear reactors are cooled by water, we've long known that there are alternatives; in fact, the world's first nuclear-powered electricity in 1951 came from a reactor ...