But it could have been much worse. The new strain of H1N1 flu could have been much more virulent, and it could even have been bird flu, which, because of the way the United States produces flu vaccine, could wreak havoc.

Months back, when a swine flu vaccine was still just a glimmer in scientists’ eyes, US health officials were driving home the message that children, and especially those with underlying health conditions like asthma and pregnant women were at great risk of dying from H1N1 influenza and should be first in line for innoculation.

But after rolling out the vaccine last month, the authorities ran into a problem: There wasn’t enough to go around. “The National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have done a very good job of emphasizing the importance of getting vaccinated. But then there’s no vaccine,” said Steven Salzberg, director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the University of Maryland.

Salzberg’s wife and younger daughters were among thousands who queued last week in Rockville, a suburb of Washington, for swine flu vaccinations. “They left when they saw the line was about 1km long before the place was even open. There were many, many hundreds arriving by the second,” Salzberg said.

Last week, as child deaths spiked well above the annual toll for kids from seasonal flu, vaccination clinics in the county that includes Rockville were abruptly cancelled. The county’s supply of vaccine had run dry. So what if this had been the next “big one”, a flu on the scale of the pandemic that killed tens of millions around the globe in 1918? After all, the strain of flu that caused the 1918 pandemic was also H1N1, the grandfather of today’s swine flu pandemic.

“If we had a really virulent highly infectious influenza strain today, it could easily be as bad as 1918,” said Salzberg. But David Beshai, associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said progress in health care and nutrition mean “a replica of 1918 is not in the cards.

“When you really need vaccine quickly, we just can’t do it, and this has now been demonstrated,” Salzberg said. He said changing the way the United States makes flu vaccine was too costly for companies to put in place and would have to come from the highest political levels.

They said tests of Sanofi -Pasteur’s A(H1N1) flu vaccine showed children respond to it just as they do to seasonal flu vaccine, with children over 10 needing only a single dose but children under 9 needing two. Separately, Sanofi said it had won a US government order for 27.3 million more doses of its vaccine and AstraZeneca’s MedImmune unit said the US government has ordered 29 million more doses of its needle-free vaccine.

Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said young children will likely need to have their doses 21 days apart. But he said they could receive seasonal flu shots and A(H1N1) shots on the same day – something that could ease the logistics of vaccinating children multiple times. “As we had hoped, in children the 2009 A(H1N1) vaccine is acting just like the seasonal flu vaccine,” Fauci told reporters in a telephone briefing.

Children aged 10 to 17 mounted an immune response that should protect them from A(H1N1) within 8 to 10 days, Fauci said. The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention said 46 US children have died from A(H1N1), which appears to have first emerged in Mexico in March and which spread around the world to cause a pandemic in only six weeks.

A(H1N1) is now the dominant strain of influenza circulating globally and Fauci said it is possible it may replace the seasonal form of A(H1N1) also circulating. “If you look at the history of where new viruses come in, frequently what they do is come back the next year and displace one or even more than one of the circulating strains,” he said. “It is a distinct possibility that this might ultimately be incorporated into a seasonal flu vaccine.” – Reuters

The study, conducted among 20,000 people by the universities of Bonn and Maastricht, also revealed that people who like to pay back perceived injustices also have fewer friends and are less satisfied with life.

The study also revealed that positively inclined people were more willing to work longer hours but only if they perceived their wages as being fair.

Researchers led by Professor Karim Nayernia at Newcastle University and the NorthEast England Stem Cell Institute (NESCI) developed a new technique that allows the creation of human sperm in the laboratory.

They stressed that the sperm, developed from stem cells with XY chromosomes (male), will not be used for fertility treatment, as this is prohibited by British law and in any case is not their main interest. “This is an important development as it will allow researchers to study in detail how sperm forms and lead to a better understanding of infertility in men,” said
Nayernia.

“It could help us develop new ways to help couples suffering infertility so they can have a child which is genetically their own.” He said more investigation was needed to decide whether the in-vitro derived (IVD) sperm, could be used as a fertility treatment. – AFP

People may choose to try to lower their blood pressure naturally, “but it matters what you do,” study author Dr Robert H. Schneider of the Maharishi University of Management in Iowa. “Not everything has the same effect.”

Citing a recent US study that showed vitamins to be ineffective at reducing the risk of strokes or heart attacks, it advised against regularly taking vitamins C and E to help prevent vascular disease.

The study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The DGN said its recommendations applied to people who had never had a stroke as well as those already suffering from impaired cerebral blood flow.

Incorporating more exercise into one’s daily routine is easy, it said, by using the stairs instead of the lift. The DGN also pointed out that people could help avoid high cholesterol and blood sugar levels – and thereby lowering the risk of a stroke – by eating fish and vegetables more often.

At least six children died and 290,000 fell ill in China last year after consuming milk formula tainted with melamine, which was added to cheat protein tests. But the causal link between melamine and kidney problems the children suffered was never scientifically established until now.

The experts studied urine samples of 15 mainland Chinese toddlers with kidney stones and compared those taken from 20 children in Hong Kong who also consumed tainted milk but who did not develop stones.

“We proved that melamine alone can cause stones … Our conclusions are that the higher the concentration of melamine in the urine, the bigger the stones,” said Lawrence Lan, associate consultant at the paediatrics surgery deparment in Hong Kong’s Queen Mary Hospital.

The experts also found what they considered to be a “safe level” of melamine in urine, above which the person may be prone to develop kidney stones.

“Everyone with stones had melamine levels above that level, and those without stones had melamine concentrations below that level,” Lan said.

The study was published in the International Journal of Clinical Chemistry and Diagnostic Laboratory Medicine.

The milk scandal battered already dented faith in China-made goods and prompted massive recalls of dairy and other food products around the world.

Melamine is used to make fertilisers, plastics and other industrial goods. Rich in nitrogen, it later found its way into food products to fool tests for protein.

It has also been detected in eggs, chocolates, ice creams, yoghurts and other foods.

China has suffered other food additive scandals in the past, including the use of carcinogenic chemicals as food colourings.

Copyright © 2008 Reuters

No trace of the chemical has been found in 19 baby formula products tested, presumably because the additive makes up less than 0.1% of the final product, the agency said.

No comment was immediately available from Tauta, which on Monday had suspended exports of lactoferrin because of the melamine find. The company was also checking where its product had been exported to and trying to trace the source of the melamine contamination.

“There’s quite a lot of sensitivity around melamine even at low levels,” chief executive Paul McGilvary told the NZ Press Association at the time.

He said the New Zealand Food Safety Authority had found fewer than four parts per million of melamine in the Tatua product, and found there was no contamination of the company’s milk supply.

South Korea has banned the imports of Chinese milk powder and rice cookies produced in China. It has also recalled tainted products from store shelves.

A growing list of Chinese milk and milk-related products have been taken off shelves around the world in recent weeks after they have been found to be contaminated with the industrial chemical melamine, sickening tens of thousands and killing four children.