Panic Half as Much: Swine Flu Vaccine May be Doubly Effective

by Mara Gordon · 2009-09-11 11:57:00 UTC
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Swine flu may expose the “global health apartheid,” as blogger Mike Smith argued this week — but we may have more resources to fight it than we think. According to new research published yesterday in the New England Journal of Medicine, a one-dose vaccine for H1N1 influenza may work much more effectively than researchers initially imagined.

This means that resources currently available for the flu vaccine will go much further than imagined. Twice as far, to be precise. Most experts had predicted that patients would require two doses of an H1N1 vaccine to be protected from the virus, which is now pandemic in 168 countries. It has infected approximately 100 million people in the United States since its arrival in spring of this year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, told the New York Times that research currently underway in the United States “corroborates and confirms the exciting data” that protection against H1N1 may require only one vaccine dose, not two.

[Photo credit: Diego Cupolo]

Mara Gordon has worked in public health in Tanzania and in Botswana. She originally hails from Washington, D.C.
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