For at least several decades, telling the elderly to get an annual flu shot seemed like a no brainer. After all, seniors are often in more fragile health, and a bout of influenza can be debilitating. Moreover, it can lead to pneumonia and other serious conditions.
But new data suggests that the flu shot doesn’t actually reduce deaths among the elderly. This contradicts a study published in 2007 that suggested that influenza immunization can actually reduce deaths in community dwelling elders. If the flu shot doesn’t save lives, is it still “worth it” to spend on promotion and delivery of the …read more

Just a quick, “food for thought” post this morning that will hopefully spark some conversation. This week’s issue of the New England Journal of Medicine includes two articles that address the fact that we have two widely used HPV vaccines (Gardasil and Cervarix), but still little evidence about their long-term safety, effectiveness, and ability to prevent cervical cancer.
What are your thoughts on HPV vaccines? On the one hand, we want to protect our girls and women and right now these are the vaccines that we have available. This is the opinion that I generally hold, though I do teeter back …read more

Reports coming out of Poland have potentially linked a trial of a new bird flu vaccine to the deaths of 21 homeless people:
Three Polish doctors and six nurses are facing criminal prosecution after a number of homeless people died following medical trials for a vaccine to the H5N1 bird-flu virus.

The medical staff, from the northern town of Grudziadz, are being investigated over medical trials on as many as 350 homeless and poor people last year, which prosecutors say involved an untried vaccine to the highly-contagious virus.
Authorities claim that the alleged victims received £1-2 to be tested with what they thought …read more