pandemic flu

(MedPage Today) -- Patients with severe respiratory failure as a result of the H1N1 pandemic flu were less likely to die if they were treated with extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) rather than standard mechanical ventilation, researchers reported.

(MedPage Today) -- Pregnant women who became severely ill with the pandemic H1N1 flu stood a one in five chance of dying, the CDC reported.

(MedPage Today) -- In the largest analysis yet, researchers have confirmed several of the factors that increased the severity of the H1N1 pandemic flu symptoms, including obesity, age, and some chronic conditions.

(MedPage Today) -- More people in the U.S. got a seasonal flu shot in 2010-2011 than ever before, according to estimates of vaccine coverage from the CDC.

(University of Washington) Scientists have demonstrated the use of computational methods to design new antiviral proteins not found in nature, but capable of targeting specific surfaces of flu virus molecules.

Such designer proteins may have diagnostic and therapeutic potential in identifying and fighting viral infections.

The researchers created a protein that disabled the part of the 1918 pandemic flu virus involved in invading respiratory tract cells.

It did so by preventing segment from reconfiguring. This same protein also disabled a similar section of an avian flu virus.

ATLANTA (AP) -- Shocking as it may seem, U.S. government doctors once thought it was fine to experiment on disabled people and prison inmates.

Such experiments included giving hepatitis to mental patients in Connecticut, squirting a pandemic flu virus up the noses of prisoners in Maryland, and injecting cancer cells into chronically ill people at a New York hospital....

(MedPage Today) -- Chinese researchers -- reporting on the administration of more than 89 million doses of the pandemic flu vaccine -- have confirmed its safety.

(Vanderbilt University Medical Center) A hallmark of pandemic flu throughout history, including the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, has been its ability to make healthy young and middle-aged adults seriously ill and even kill this population in disproportionate numbers.In a paper published Dec. 5 in Nature Medicine, Vanderbilt University Medical Center researchers provide a possible explanation for this alarming phenomenon of pandemic flu.

The study's findings suggest people are made critically ill, or even killed, by their own immune response.

(MedPage Today) -- As expected, the U.S. flu vaccine for next fall will include the pandemic flu that has swept the world, the FDA said.

(MedPage Today) -- Physicians using standard diagnostic criteria -- which include fever -- may miss mild cases of the pandemic flu, researchers reported.