industry.bnet.com | Jan 5, 2010

By Jim Edwards

PositiveID (PSID) is to begin a study of its Health Link implantable microchip in diabetic, hypertensive and obese patients.

The study –like everything else associated with the company formerly known as VeriChip — is bound to be controversial. The Health Link chip is implanted under a patient’s skin. It can be scanned to access the patient’s online medical records. The company’s critics fear the chip will one day become mandatory, leading to a complete loss of medical privacy, or that Americans will be unable to receive healthcare unless they get chipped.

BNET has noted that PositiveID also owns a credit monitoring and identity-theft prevention company, Steel Vault, and that it envisions its chips being linked to Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT) and employers. PositiveID linked credit monitoring and the Health Link chip in its most recent 10-Q.

While PositiveID’s press release gives few specifics, it indicates that the study will have something to do with the Health Link chip and customers of HealthScreenDirect, a company that offers screening for diabetes and high cholesterol.

Full Story

herald.ie | Dec 14, 2009

By Clodagh Sheehy

Swine flu vaccine has caused adverse reactions in 619 people to date, varying from seizures and anaphylactic shock to fainting and vomiting.

Two more people have died from the flu but the number of people falling ill with the virus has halved in the past week.

More than 400,000 vaccinations against swine flu have been carried out, according to the latest figures from the Irish Medicines Board which details the reported side effects for both forms of the vaccines — Pandemrix and Celvapan.

Of the 619 people who showed side effects to the vaccine, 52 had an allergic reaction and three of these went into anaphylactic shock.

Altogether 210 children reacted adversely to the vaccine, 15 with an allergic reaction and some of the children needed hospital treatment as a result.

Forty pregnant women reported side effects, four of them allergic and one woman, with a history of miscarriage, lost her baby.

Six people had seizures, two people reported facial palsy and the IMB was made aware of the death of one patient 10 days after vaccination but says the patient had an underlying condition and there was no evidence of a link between the vaccine and the patient’s death.

“Most people receiving the vaccine have serious and/or chronic underlying medical conditions which put them at greater risk of developing serious complications of swine flu,” says the board adding “this is why it is important for these people to be vaccinated as a priority”.

Generally the reactions included flu-like illness, head-ache, dizziness and fainting, pins and needles, transient weakness of the vaccinated limb and nausea and vomiting.

The latest people to die from swine flu were two men with underlying illnesses, one from the east and the other from the south of the country, bringing the total deaths to 20.

Health officials say there has been a marked decline in the spread of the virus in the past week, down to 5,500 new cases compared to 10,500 the previous week.

Reuters | Dec 19, 2009

LONDON (Reuters) – H1N1 pandemic swine flu is far less lethal than feared, British scientists said on Wednesday, but public health officials should not be complacent in fighting it and vaccination campaigns should continue.

The first comprehensive analysis of deaths from swine flu in England since the H1N1 virus was declared a pandemic in June shows there are 26 deaths in every 100,000 cases of swine flu — a death rate of 0.026 percent.

The study echoes U.S. research published on Monday which found the H1N1 pandemic had a death rate of 0.048 percent, or 1 death in 2,000 cases — only a little more serious than an average flu season.

“The first influenza pandemic of the 21st century is considerably less lethal than was feared in advance,” England’s chief medical officer Liam Donaldson wrote in the study carried out by his team at the government’s Health Protection Agency.

The researchers said their fatality rate estimate compared well with three 20th century flu pandemics — the rate for the 1918 Spanish flu was 2 to 3 percent and subsequent pandemics in 1957/8 and 1967/8 had rates of around 0.2 percent.

Donaldson said improvements in nutrition, housing and health care might explain some of the apparent decrease in case death rates from one pandemic to the next.

“Since the most recent pandemic there have been major advances in intensive care medicine,” he added, and many more may have died without critical care services such as machines to ventilate patients with breathing difficulties.

The study should allay fears among public health officials and policymakers that a flu pandemic could kill millions around the world and push economies deeper into recession. It may also add to suspicions that health officials and the drug industry hyped the threat posed H1N1.

Swine flu has killed 10,074 people worldwide since it was declared a pandemic in June, according to the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control. Experts say seasonal flu can kill up to 40,000 people a year in Europe alone.

Donaldson said the analysis showed two-thirds of those who died from H1N1 would now be eligible for vaccines under the British government’s high-risk-first vaccination priority plan, suggesting the vaccination campaign was still important.

Doctors have been vaccinating high-risk groups such as sick patients in hospital, pregnant women, people with asthma or other underlying health problems and healthcare workers with GlaxoSmithKline’s Pandemrix vaccine and Baxter’s Celvapan, but uptake has been slow as many see H1N1 as mild.

The government is now extending the vaccination campaign to children under five and Donaldson said there was a case for extending it to the wider population given that a large minority — 38 percent — of deaths occurred in non-high-risk groups.

The study was published in the British Medical Journal and includes all known deaths in England from H1N1 until November 8.

It found that in most fatal cases, patients had not started taking antiviral drugs such as Roche’s Tamiflu or Glaxo’s Relenza until around 5 days after symptoms began.

This finding reinforces the need to use medicines like antivirals and vaccines wherever possible, the researchers said.

Global Research | Dec 10, 2009

by Olga Chetverikova

After an annual meeting of the Bilderberg Club in May 2009, the establishment of the global management system of institutions seemed to have been given a boost, repeating the plots of American apocalypitc blockbusters.

As soon as the financial top had opted for a lingering crisis, global managers were instructed to work in two major ways: first, to invent a myth about the danger of swine flu pandemic (in order to take control of the national healthcare systems and reorganize the World Health Organization (WHO) into a global healthcare ministry) and impose a threat of global warming to gain control of world natural resources and introduce a unified ‘green’ tax (alongside with creation of a new sub-national managing body- an international ministry of ecology).

Both tasks aim to intimidate the population and thus substantiate any policies undertaken by international organziations. Chairman of the Board of Governors ‘British Petroluem’, Peter Suterlan, once frankly admitted that he would like to impose fear of global warming in order to increase taxes and make people revise their lifestyle.

The implementation of the first scenario suggested by the Bilderberg Club is currently underway.

After the WHO announced the A/H1N1 pandemic on July 11, 2009, a real hysteria was launched in mass media worldwide, and people were told to get prepared for the pandemic in November and undergo vaccination (in 2005 the WHO added an amendment to its Charter which says that duirng a pandemic the organization does not recommend but gives instructions and orders, and the number of vaccines should be no less than 4.6 billion). The operation reached its peak when in late September Barack Obama signed a decree to impose ‘a flu pandemic sanitary emergency’, which means that the citizens could be vaccinated against their will and kept in special quarantine zones. Amid panic, Americans and West Europeans were involved in mass immunization, which unveiled that the pandemic had been paid in order to let pharmaceutical companies thrive on it, and also as a weapon against ‘unwanted’ population (and now we all know what a swine flu vaccine is). It was also used as a so-called ‘innovative’ mechanism of handling political processes- which was so actively used in Ukraine. In view of this, the WHO gained extra powers and strengthened its status.

Now we are witnessing another show titled “The UN Copenhagen climate change conference”, currently held in the Danish capital (it will run through December 18) and aiming to work out a document to limit global emissions and replace the Kyoto Protocol which expires in 2012. Thirty thousand participants, including 60 heads of states and prime mnisters, have arrived there on December,7.

The EU, being one of the major organizers of the summit, had elected its first President, who was immediately described in the media as a creature of the Bilderberg club: on November, 15, a few days before his appointment, Herman Van Rompuy met with the club`s top managers at Val Duchesse castle outside Brussels, where he spoke about the need to revise the mechanism of the EU`s financing and suggested a unified ‘green’ tax which would go directly to Brussels. The fact that the issue was covered in the media proves that members of the Bilderberg Club are no longer going to conceal that they are the real bosses in Europe.

Such confidence annoyed some of the European Parliament members. One of them, an Italian Mario Borghezio, said: “All three candidates (for the role of the EU president) often attended meeting at the Bilderberg club, and I think that they should explain whether they are honest candidates representing their native country or just members of secret groups which had been organized to discuss pressing social and other kinds of issues”. Another MP, an Englishman Nigel Farage criticized Rompuy`s appointment and called him a ‘puppet-leader’ in the hands of Barroso. He even dared to say that the EU is an authoritarian dictatorship ruled by bureaucracy which is not elected by anybody. Commenting on the Lisbon Treaty, Farage told the delegates: “It took you 8,5 years of intimidation, lying and disrespect towards democratic referendums to lobby this deal!”

Immediately after his appointment as the EU President, Van Rompuy (known in Europe as ‘master of compromising’) assured his patrons that he perfectly understood all the tasks he was facing. Speaking at a press-conference, Herman Van Rompuy said that 2009 has become the ‘first year of global management’ (he meant the G20), while the Climate Summit in Copenhagen is a next step in this direction’.

The Danish government carried out a reshuffle and appointed Lykke Friis, pro-dean at the Copenhagen University, as Climate Minister to replace Connie Hedegaard, a member of the Bilderberg Club. The latter swapped her title to First Commissioner on the EU Climate, which was introduced in October 2009 especially in order to control the reduction of CO2 emissions by 20% by the year 2020. Hedegaard is a member of numerous committees and organizations, including the Danish Atlantic Treaty Association led by Robert Gunther.

What goals are being pursued in Copenhagen this time?

Lord Christopher Monckton, former adviser to Margaret Thatcher, explained: “When I read this treaty I see that the authors are talking about the establishment of ‘one world Marxist government’. The second purpose is the transfer of wealth from the countries of the West to third world countries, in satisfaction of what is called, coyly, ‘climate debt’ – because we’ve been burning CO2 and they haven’t. We’ve been screwing up the climate and they haven’t. And the third purpose of this new entity, this government, is enforcement,” Monckton warned. He then noted that the new treaty would be supported by most of the third world countries ‘as they think they will receive money for it’. And the US President will sign it without expecting two thirds of the Senate and the Congress to ratify it.

And the ‘world government’, which would be empowered to interfere in other countries` economic and ecological policies, and the ‘enforcement’- these all are just mechanisms to ‘transfer resources’ which actually means reforming economies of the non-western countries with the use of progressive technologies in order to gain control these resources within that level of consumption permitted in the West that would guarantee a drop in the planet`s population.

It is no secret that the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was adopted after the idea of global warming resulting from anthropogenic factors had been promoted among scientists. In 1997 the Kyoto Protocol was prtensented as an international agreement linked to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The Protocol sets binding targets for 37 industrialized countries and the European community for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions .These amount to an average of five per cent against 1990 levels over the five-year period 2008-2012. The US, being the world`s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, has not ratified the Protocol. The EU (now comprising the Baltic States and the countries of Eastern Europe) took the burden of the responsibility to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 8%, Japan and Canada- by 6%. The Protocol limits emission in Russia and Ukraine to a percentage increase or decrease from their 1990 levels. The developing countries, including China and India were not included in numerical limitation of the Kyoto Protocol.

However, the implementation of the Kyoto deal failed to help in resolving environmental problems but added a new commodity to the international market: quota on GHG. It turned into a pure speculation and let the financial capital grasp onto a vital energy sector in the developing countries. Due to their imperfect industrial policies, the developed states could not succeed in modernization and GHG reducing. That is why they found another means to fulfill their obligations: a developed state helps a developing one to reduce emissions and then counts the limited tons of GHG as if those were reduce on its territory. Very soon hundreds of companies and foundations joined this ‘green’ quota games hoping to thrive on it. In the long run, the international environmental market received the strongest expansion ever, and it originally there were only three purchasers: the World Bank, the governments of the Netherlands and Japan, now their number has increased sharply, and professional speculators now make up to 40% of the participants in hydrocarbon exchanges.

Having accepted the conditions, Russia later faced an ambiguous situation: the country has large stocks of free greenhouse gases but this is because in 1990s its industry was in severe crisis, and all emissions then even fell below 30%.

The international community plans to introduce new emission quotas to restrict industrial development and impose western environmental standards that require implementation of very costly projects (and these expenses will never be compensated by the sums earned on ‘green’ quotas trading). And taking into consideration that climate in Russia requires constant expenditures on energy, the country will hardly be able to restore its industrial power.

A group of developed nations have prepared a brand new document especially for the Copenhagen summit. The document says that the divison into developed and developing nations has long become outdated, while today all the states should be obliged to cut GHG emissions and provide assisstance to the poorest countries. The treaty is expected to be legally binding as well so that the states approved new rules at the governmental level. But the differences between the participants were so great that they only managed to agree on a road map plan without discussing the figures.

However, high promises of financial and investment assisstance proved to be more effective than legal mechanisms, and ahead of the summit the leading developing nations followed in the West`s footsteps and pledged GHG emissions cuts by 2020. The EU announced a 20% reduction from the 1990 level, while the US said it will reduce its emissions by 17% from the 2005 level (in accordance with a draft law approved by the House of Representatives). India claimed it wil reduce 20-25%, whiel South Korea and China announced the figures of 30% and 40-45% respectively.

Russian WWF, Greenpeace and Ecoprotection activists said ‘Russia should play the leading role at the talks. We can and should remain at the 1990 level of 30%. And then we shoud proceed with further reduction”. At the Russa-EU summit in November, Dmitry Medvedev said the country would try to reduce its GHG emissions up to 25% by 2020, and added that by 2050 Russia will be ready to cut emission by no less than 50% in comparison to the 1990 level.

This kind of unanimity hides the real differences between the participants of the summit and the gravity of environmental problems and adds fuel to the fire caused by the idea of ‘catastrophic global warming’. Recently, the Prince of Wales Charles has delivered a report in which he said that ‘nations have less than 100 months to act to save the planet from irreversible damage due to climate change.

Global management does everything to hide the real state of affairs. It ignores information and scientific research from alternative sources, especially if the threat of global warming and its anthropogenic factors are being argued (mind the recent leakage of e-mails from the University of East Anglia`s Climatic Research, the so-called ‘climate gate’).

In the past 20 years a powerful system of ecological ‘brainwashing’ has been created which serves the participants in ‘green’ business who can thus control the Earth`s natural resources. But in their attempts to keep the world`s population deluded, global speculators and their servants among politicians have long surpassed reasonable limits.

I remember an old Russian proverb: the devil is scary when you cannot see him but when you do he makes you laugh.

Benefits of Tamiflu are overated claim experts

express.co.uk | Dec 9, 2009

By Victoria Fletcher

TAMIFLU does not work on healthy patients who get swine flu, experts have claimed.

An investigation by the British Medical Journal has found no robust data to prove that Tamiflu prevents swine flu from becoming a serious condition.

In what could prove an acute embarrassment to the Government, analysis by two teams of academics suggests that the benefits of Tamiflu were vastly over-estimated.

And it could call into question the Government’s decision to spend £500million stockpiling the drug.

The research, published in the BMJ online, reviewed a number of studies looking at how well Tamiflu works in otherwise healthy patients.

Some of the data was provided by the drug’s manufacturer Roche. But after some research was thrown out of the analysis, experts said they could only find evidence to prove Tamiflu reduces the length of illness by a day.

Although they admitted it was of great use in reducing the severity of swine flu in people with underlying health conditions, they said this was not the case in “healthy” swine flu victims.

Dr Fiona Godlee, editor-in-chief of the BMJ, said there was not enough good research on Tamiflu to prove it works on healthy patients. “Governments around the world have spent billions of pounds on a drug that the scientific community now finds itself unable to judge,” she said.

The news came as another area of the Government’s pandemic flu campaign also descended into chaos. Health Secretary Andy Burnham announced that under-fives will be offered the swine flu jab in the next three weeks.

But it quickly emerged that GP leaders were not on-board with the plan, following a row over how much they would be paid. While the Government wants to pay £5.25 for each jab given, the British Medical Association said this was not enough.

The impasse means local health bosses will have to step into the breach and negotiate a pay deal with family doctors or ask pharmacists and district nurses to provide the jabs instead.

Last night the Government stood by its decision to offer Tamiflu to all patients.

A spokesman said: “On November 30 the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies reviewed the most up-to-date available evidence on anti-viral use and concluded that it clearly continues to point towards a benefit in those with severe illness.”

A spokesman for Roche said that they “firmly believe in the robustness of the data”.

The researchers said the benefits of Tamiflu were small and that authorities should consider its side effects before using the drug in healthy people.

AP | Dec 8, 2009

By MARIA CHENG

LONDON — British researchers say there is little evidence Tamiflu stops complications in healthy people who catch the flu, though public health officials contend the swine flu drug reduces flu hospitalizations and deaths.

Researchers at the Cochrane Review, an international nonprofit that reviews health information, looked at previously published papers on Tamiflu as used for seasonal flu. They found insufficient data to prove whether the antiviral reduces complications like pneumonia in otherwise healthy people but concluded the drug shortens flu symptoms by about a day. The papers were published online Tuesday in the British journal, BMJ.

The researchers said the benefits of Tamiflu were small and that authorities should consider its side effects before using the drug in healthy people. While the reviewed studies only looked at Tamiflu use for seasonal flu, the experts said their conclusions raised questions about the widespread use of the drug in people with any flu-like illness, including swine flu.

Fiona Godlee, BMJ’s editor, said the papers cast doubt not only on how safe and effective Tamiflu is, but on the drug regulatory system that approved it. “Governments around the world have spent billions of pounds (dollars) on a drug that the scientific community now finds itself unable to judge,” she said in a statement.

But the World Health Organization disagreed. They said data from countries around the world show that when given early, Tamiflu can reduce the severity of swine flu symptoms, though the agency recommends the drug be saved for people at risk of complications, like pregnant women, the elderly, children, and those with underlying medical problems.

“This will not change our (Tamiflu) guidelines,” said Charles Penn, a WHO antivirals expert. Penn said that while past studies show Tamiflu only has a modest benefit, when patients with severe illness or at risk of complications are treated early, there are fewer hospitalizations and deaths.

And Roche, the maker of Tamiflu, defended the drug, saying in a statement that they “firmly believe in the robustness of the data.”

Both the British researchers and WHO said there is little evidence to support the widespread use of Tamiflu in otherwise healthy people — precisely the policy Britain has adopted to fight swine flu.

In addition to recommending Tamiflu be saved for at-risk groups, WHO recommends Tamiflu only be used on a doctor’s recommendation.

In Britain, however, Tamiflu is regularly dispensed to healthy people who catch the flu. The drug is given out via a national swine flu hotline by call center workers with no medical training.

H1N1 toll likely to be lower, but vaccinations are still encouraged

Washington Post | Dec 8, 2009

Flu pandemic could be mild

By Rob Stein

With the second wave of H1N1 infections having crested in the United States, leading epidemiologists are predicting that the pandemic could end up ranking as the mildest since modern medicine began documenting influenza outbreaks.

Experts warn that the flu is notoriously unpredictable, but several recent analyses, including one released late Monday, indicate that the death toll is likely to be far lower than the number of fatalities caused by past pandemics.

The predictions are being met with a mix of skepticism, relief and trepidation: Public health officials worry that people may become complacent about getting vaccinated, which could prove disastrous if a third wave of infections swells later this winter or the virus mutates into a more dangerous form.

“I think it is very likely to be the mildest pandemic on record,” said Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiology professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, who led a federally funded analysis with researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and elsewhere published online Monday by the journal PLoS Medicine.

The analysis, based on data collected in New York City and Milwaukee, indicates that the virus may directly cause 6,000 to 45,000 deaths by the end of the winter, with the final toll probably falling between 10,000 and 15,000, Lipsitch said. In the worst-case scenario, the swine flu pandemic would kill no more than about 60,000 people, his new analysis concluded.

Several experts noted that even if the overall death toll does end up being relatively low, the pandemic already has taken an unusually high number of children and young adults.

“We’ve had hundreds of deaths among children, which is a tragedy any way you look at it,” said Anne Schuchat, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.

A typical flu season is associated with an average of 36,000 deaths in the United States, and an estimate released in August by a presidential advisory panel that Lipsitch was involved in predicted that the 2009 H1N1 virus could kill 30,000 to 90,000 in this country.

“Those were the best estimates we could make at the time based on the data available at the time,” he said. “We now have much better data to make estimates from.”

When the presidential council’s estimate was made, experts thought the virus could make up to 30 percent of the population sick. So far, the virus appears to be causing symptoms in a much smaller proportion, perhaps 15 percent, Lipsitch said.

The new analysis also indicates that the pandemic’s “symptomatic case-fatality ratio” — the percentage of those who become ill and die — has been far lower than the previous three pandemics.

“If things continue as they’ve gone so far, this could turn out to be quite mild,” said Ira M. Longini Jr., a professor of biostatistics at the University of Washington in Seattle who has calculated a similarly low case-fatality rate based on CDC data.

Several experts praised the new analysis as the most sophisticated and therefore reliable to date.

“From what we know now, it would appear this is the mildest, both compared to 1968 and 1957 and certainly 1918,” said Neal M. Ferguson, an epidemiologist at Imperial College in London who advises the World Health Organization and the Health and Human Services Department. The pattern appears to be consistent in other developed countries, such as Britain, he noted.

Others, however, cautioned that previous pandemics have produced deadly late-winter waves, which could occur in this case. More older people could also become infected, which could also increase the toll.

“I would hold my horses until we are through the winter,” said Lone Simonsen, a research professor at George Washington University.

To encourage Americans to continue to get vaccinated, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced a new multimedia advertising campaign Monday aimed at countering complacency. After a slow start, more than 80 million doses of vaccine are now available, she said.

“We have to seize this opportunity as disease is going down slightly to remind folks how important this is,” she said.

While agreeing that people should continue to be inoculated, Lipsitch and others said they doubt that a major increase in deaths would occur in a third wave without some significant shift in the virus.

“There’s a faint possibility,” Ferguson said. “But I don’t think there will be a major change.”

One major reason for the relatively low death toll is that the elderly have largely been unaffected, apparently because many have some immunity against the disease. The 36,000 deaths blamed on a typical flu season include many that are caused by heart attacks, strokes and other complications associated with the flu among seniors and people with other health problems. About 9,000 deaths are directly caused by the influenza virus during a typical flu season.

“Sometimes Mother Nature throws us a break,” said Howard Markel, director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan.

But other factors may also be playing a role, including the virus being less likely to cause illness than viruses involved in previous pandemics, as well as better medical care available than in previous decades, such as antiviral drugs and more sophisticated intensive-care techniques.

“In 1918, it was really prehistoric medical care,” Markel said. “In 1957, we really didn’t have intensive care. In 1968, we were starting to have it, but it was nothing like we have today.”

Nonetheless, Lipsitch and others stressed that the multibillion-dollar vaccination campaign and other intense responses were appropriate, given the uncertainty of what the nation and world was facing.

“We got lucky,” Lipsitch said. “But if we didn’t have a plan in place and we had 60,000 or 70,000 deaths, people would have been justifiably outraged.”

As swine flu begins to wane, researchers are starting to get a grasp of the virus’ magnitude this season and it’s a lot less severe than originally forecast.

portfolio.com | Dec 7, 2009

The current wave of swine flu in the U.S. will result in a death toll only slightly higher or even lower than that caused by seasonal influenza in a typical year, according to research published in the journal PLoS Medicine. The government-backed researchers looked at flu cases in Milwaukee and New York from last spring to make projections.

An average of 36,000 people die from influenza-related causes every year in the U.S., the researchers say. Under one scenario, the U.S. death rate from swine flu could be as low as 7,800 to 29,000 deaths. However, children up to 4 years old were among those affected the most by the disease and a lull in the virus’ spread could be temporary, the scientists warn. The flu could return in January.

That’s not to say some companies didn’t make some money off the flu. Big drug companies produced millions of shots, while drug-store chains saw sales stoked by cold and flu medicines, hand sanitizer and clinical services.

European drug makers AstraZeneca Plc, Novartis AG, Sanofi-Aventis SA, GlaxoSmithKline Plc and Australia’s CSL Ltd. sold 250 doses of swine flu vaccine to the U.S. government, and worldwide sales of shots helped boost sales for these companies.

Meanwhile, Walgreen Co. and CVS Caremark Corp. sold more cold and flu medicines, hand sanitizer as they administered vaccines in their stores in hopes of showing off their clinical services.

A masked girl sits with a classmate at a kindergarten in a residential estate in Hong Kong on Jun. 11, 2009. Photograph by: Mike Clarke, AFP/Getty Images

“There was never any evidence, not from Day 1, and not anytime since, that this strain of flu was going to be a particularly dangerous strain, either in terms of its capacity to make people sick or its capacity to kill people.” – Philip Alcabes, associate professor in urban public health at Hunter College’s School of Health Sciences in the City University of New York.

Canwest News Service | Dec 4, 2009

By Sharon Kirkey

With H1N1 poised to enter history as the least deadly of four global flu pandemics, some experts are calling for an end to Canada’s mass vaccination program.

Nature is already achieving what we would hope to achieve by vaccinating, they say.

H1N1’s “reproductive number” — the number of people each infected person passes the virus to — was above one when the epidemic began, which led to the explosive initial increase in cases.

Now it is less than one, because many people have become immune, and each old case is making less than one new case. When the reproductive number falls below one, the epidemic can’t sustain itself, and fades away.

The drop in cases suggests Canada has hit the critical fraction of the population that needs to be vaccinated to control the pandemic, says Dr. David Fisman, a University of Toronto expert in infectious disease dynamics.

Fisman can’t understand the rational for continuing mass vaccinations. He said that for a virus as contagious as H1N1, fewer than 30 per cent of the population needed vaccination to reach a critical level of immunity.

“I’m sure that the vaccine has prevented some deaths. I’m sure that there are people who are alive right now who would not have been alive if we hadn’t vaccinated,” he says. But the pandemic was already peaking, and then subsiding before the vaccination was rolling out in force.

“That’s nobody’s fault, that’s just how long it took to make a vaccine against a brand new virus. Those were the cards we were dealt,” says Fisman, an associate professor of infectious diseases epidemiology at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health.

Despite that view, Canada’s top doctor this week pleaded with Canadians to get vaccinated if they have not already done so. Chief public health officer David Butler-Jones said that, while 30 per cent of the population is now immune to H1N1, either because they have been vaccinated or because they have already been infected, “millions” of people are still at risk of infection.

Someone vaccinated today may be protected against infection two weeks from now, “if there is still enough of (H1N1) kicking around,” Fisman says. But the benefit diminishes the further into the future we go, and he says other public health programs have suffered as staff and resources were redeployed to the H1N1 campaign. In some jurisdictions, breastfeeding support programs, sexually transmitted diseases clinics and other usual activities were cancelled or postponed as public health was forced to bear the brunt of delivering the largest immunization program in Canada’s history.

“At this point, in terms of saying everybody must get vaccinated because there is a pandemic abroad, it’s kind of done,” Fisman says.

H1N1 will likely die out with a death rate lower than that for regular seasonal flu.

Harvard University infectious disease expert Marc Lipsitch is pegging H1N1’s case fatality rate — the proportion of people infected with a disease who die of it — at less than 0.1 per cent, placing human swine flu in a category 1 pandemic, the lowest level of severity for a worldwide disease outbreak. Swine flu’s case fatality rate is less than what was seen for the three worldwide flu outbreaks in the 20th century: 1918, 1957 and 1968.

Unless the virus mutates, and there is no strong sign H1N1 is becoming noticeably different, “it’s almost certainly going to be the mildest of the four (pandemics) that we have good data on,” says Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health.

When the World Health Organization declared the pandemic in June, officials warned the rogue virus threatened all of humanity. The reality is so far proving strikingly different from what was expected.

The world agency, and Canada, had done their pandemic planning with a different flu virus in mind. They spent five years watching H5N1, or “bird flu,” which kills up to 60 per cent of those it infects.

We got off lucky when the real pandemic hit, WHO says, but the public doesn’t always understand that.

“Adjusting public perceptions to suit a far less lethal virus has been problematic,” WHO said in a statement Thursday, issued in response to media reports that ties with the drug industry among expert advisers may have influenced WHO’s policy decisions related to H1N1.

“Given the discrepancy between what was expected and what has happened, a search for ulterior motives on the part of WHO and its scientific advisers is understandable, though without justification.

“WHO has consistently assessed the impact of the current influenza pandemic as moderate. WHO has consistently reminded the medical community, public and the media that the overwhelming majority of patients experience mild influenza-like illness and recover fully within a week, even without any form of medical treatment.”

But some critics say WHO set itself up for blame.

“They had been talking for years about the possibility of some kind of reprise of the 1918 pandemic,” says Philip Alcabes, author of Dread: How Fear and Fantasy Have Fueled Epidemics from the Black Death to the Avian Flu. “A huge amount of money and person power was devoted to preparing” for the next outbreak, he says.

But, “there was never any evidence, not from Day 1, and not anytime since, that this strain of flu was going to be a particularly dangerous strain, either in terms of its capacity to make people sick or its capacity to kill people,” says Alcabes, associate professor in urban public health at Hunter College’s School of Health Sciences in the City University of New York.

“Yet that’s the story that’s always been told, almost every single day since it appeared in April. ‘We don’t know what’s going to happen.’ Essentially, ‘the sky might fall.’”

Lipsitch, of Harvard, says that when the first reports were coming out of Mexico, the case fatality rate estimates were as high as four per cent, which is twice the rate for the 1918 Spanish flu.

“If you don’t know how bad your enemy is, you plan as if it’s bad, and you hope that you’re over-planning. In this case, that’s exactly what was done,” he says.

“I think the response has been appropriate for what we knew at each stage, but what we know has changed, because the data gets better.”

Daily Mail | Dec 3, 2009

By Chris Brooke

Heartbroken: Lisa Hessey was told she would have her parental rights taken away in court if she opposed a decision to place Zak in care

Like many toddlers, Zak Hessey was a fussy eater who refused his mother’s healthy home cooking.

Concerned about his falling weight, his parents sought the advice of doctors. That simple act triggered a shocking chain of events that led to the youngster being put into foster care for four months.

Paul and Lisa Hessey believe in the long-term benefits of healthy eating and rejected advice to feed their two-year-old son high-calorie snack food such as chocolate, crisps and cakes.

To their horror, social workers put Zak into foster care ‘to assess his needs’ and allegedly threatened the couple with the loss of their parental rights if they fought the decision in court.

‘I was absolutely devastated, I broke down in tears,’ recalled Mrs Hessey, 48. ‘I was scared out of my wits. I phoned Paul to tell him and he just broke down on the phone.’

But they went to court and, after four months, Zak returned home with the blessing of social services, who accepted he had good and caring parents.

Zak is now putting on some weight, but his eating problems were not cured by his time in the care of ‘experts’ and, much to the annoyance of his parents, he has acquired a taste for junk food.

Mrs Hessey, of Bolsover, near Chesterfield, said: ‘I thought I was doing the right thing going to the best people for advice when Zak began to lose weight.

‘Instead they basically accused me of neglecting him and implied it was all my fault. I have four other children and they are perfectly healthy, it was just that Zak was refusing food for some reason. They said I should just feed Zak chocolate, cakes and junk food just to get calories into him. But I objected, saying that was only a short-term answer and not a proper solution.

‘The Government and doctors are always drumming into parents the importance of healthy eating – yet they were telling us to feed Zak all the wrong things.

‘That is obviously what they were doing when he was in foster care so now it is hard to get him to eat anything else.’

Mrs Hessey and her 48-year-old husband, a lorry driver, took Zak to see a paediatrician at Chesterfield Royal Hospital in July. He was 20 months old and weighed 1st 3lb.

Mrs Hessey, whose four other children are under ten, said she was happy for Zak to be admitted for a two-week hospital assessment and was hit by a thunderbolt when she went to collect him on July 24.

She was taken into a room with a nurse and social worker who apparently told her: ‘We would like Zak to go into foster care to assess how he feeds. You have legal rights but be warned if you oppose this we will go straight to court and have all your parental rights taken away.’

Mrs Hessey said: ‘They kept saying, “If you love Zak and you want the best for him then you’ll agree to this”. They said we had been negative about eating. That was because they had been telling us we should feed Zak crisps, chocolate and cakes to get calories into him.

‘I was questioning that approach. We eat proper home-made food at our house and just have chocolate and cakes as a treat.’

She agreed to Zak going into care after hearing to the possible repercussions if she objected. Initially she and her husband couldn’t see Zak for six days.

After hiring a solicitor, they were allowed three hours a day with him during the week in the company of a social worker.

The first hearing before the family court in Derby was on September 2 and the case was adjourned for two weeks. Interim care orders were imposed and Zak returned home following a third court hearing on November 18. By this stage social workers had lifted their objections – and he had put on only 1lb.

Mrs Hessey said: ‘Social services did a complete about turn. They admitted that in foster care Zak was exactly the same with his food as he was at home.

‘They said we were very good parents. I still find it hard to come to terms with how we have been treated.’ Derbyshire County Council said: ‘We only take a child into our care either with the consent of the parents or following very careful consideration by a court.’

A spokesman for Chesterfield Royal Hospital said: ‘While we understand Mr and Mrs Hessey’s distress, Zak’s welfare was paramount and we believe we acted in his best interest.’