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Expert unease over deadly flu virus 'created' in Dutch laboratory Friday 25 November 2011 Dutch scientists have created a flu virus which is so deadly there is doubt about whether the research should be published, the Volkskrant reports on Friday. The paper says American experts are worried detailed information could fall into the wrong hands and that terrorists could recreate the virus as a weapon. The fears are notable because the work was carried out on behalf of the National Institutes of Health in the US. The research team, led by Ron Fouchier, professor of virology at Erasmus teaching hospital,...

A group of scientists is pushing to publish research about how they created a man-made flu virus that could potentially wipe out civilisation. The deadly virus is a genetically tweaked version of the H5N1 bird flu strain, but is far more infectious and could pass easily between millions of people at a time. The research has caused a storm of controversy and divided scientists, with some saying it should never have been carried out.

A natural lipid in the fluid lining the lungs inhibits influenza infections in both cell cultures and mouse models, according to researchers at National Jewish Health. These findings, combined with previous studies demonstrating effectiveness against respiratory syncytial virus, suggest that the molecule, known as POPG, may have broad antiviral activity. “Supplemental POPG could be an important, inexpensive and novel approach for the prevention and treatment of influenza and other respiratory virus infections,” said Dennis Voelker, PhD, Professor of Medicine, and senior author in the report, published online in the American journal of Respiratory Cell and Molecular Biology.

Bird flu and human flu could merge into 'one of biggest biological threats of our time', warn scientists A new deadly strain of super-flu could spread to Britain within 24 hours, experts have warned. The potential for bird flu and human flu to combine and form a new virus has been described as 'one of the biggest biological threats of our time'. The alert comes as people have started to fall victim to seasonal flu and the more virulent swine flu at the same time, according to the Daily Express.

People carrying extra pounds may need extra protection from influenza. New research from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill shows that obesity may make annual flu shots less effective. The findings, published online Oct. 25, 2011, in he International Journal of Obesity, provide evidence explaining a phenomenon that was noticed for the first time during the 2009 H1N1 flu outbreak: that obesity is associated with an impaired immune response to the influenza vaccination in humans. "These results suggest that overweight and obese people would be more likely than healthy weight people to experience flu illness following exposure to...

UCLA life scientists and their colleagues have discovered the first evidence of the H1N1 virus in animals in Africa. In one village in northern Cameroon, a staggering 89 percent of the pigs studied had been exposed to the H1N1 virus, commonly known as the swine flu. "I was amazed that virtually every pig in this village was exposed," said Thomas B. Smith, director of UCLA's Center for Tropical Research and the senior author of the research. "Africa is ground zero for a new pandemic. Many people are in poor health there, and disease can spread very rapidly without authorities knowing...

Examination of lung tissue and other autopsy material from 68 American soldiers who died of respiratory infections in 1918 has revealed that the influenza virus that eventually killed 50 million people worldwide was circulating in the United States at least four months before the 1918 influenza reached pandemic levels that fall. The study, using tissues preserved since 1918, was led by Jeffery K. Taubenberger, M.D., Ph.D., of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health. The researchers found proteins and genetic material from the 1918 influenza virus in specimens from 37 of...

Two teams of federal and university scientists announced today that they had resurrected the 1918 influenza virus, the cause of one of history's most deadly epidemics, and had found that unlike the viruses that caused more recent flu pandemics of 1957 and 1968, the 1918 virus was actually a bird flu that jumped directly to humans. The work, being published in the journals Nature and Science, involved getting the complete genetic sequence of the 1918 virus, using techniques of molecular biology to synthesize it, and then using it to infect mice and human lung cells in a specially equipped, secure...

The joke that's going around is that the Mayans got it wrong: The world is ending this year, not 2012. Here's the lates sign of that. A superbug is spreading around America, and has hit Southern California. LA Times: A dangerous drug-resistant bacterium has spread to patients in Southern California, according to a study by Los Angeles County public health officials. More than 350 cases of the Carbapenem-Resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae, or CRKP, have been reported at healthcare facilities in Los Angeles County, mostly among elderly patients at skilled-nursing and long-term care facilities, according to a study by Dr. Dawn Terashita,...

How can this happen in 2011? I was just talking with him 3 weeks ago about possibly going bass fishing with him in Mexico this Spring. Seems he checked into the hospital about a week ago complaining of respiratory troubles after contracting the flu. They released him shortly after. He posted on his Facebook page at that time about how it sucks being sick, and how good it would be just to walk 20 feet without gasping for breath. 2 days later, hie son and ex-wife found him dead in bed. I am stunned. He was in good health. No...

Convalescent plasma therapy—using plasma from patients who have recovered from an infection to treat those with the same infection—has been used to treat multiple diseases. However, the efficacy of this treatment in patients with severe 2009 H1N1 influenza is unknown. A study published in the February 15 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases suggests that convalescent plasma may reduce the death rate in patients severely ill with this type of influenza. (Please see below for a link to the embargoed study online.) From September 2009 through June 2010, patients from a hospital cluster in Hong Kong with severe 2009 H1N1 infection...

Intensive care units across Britain are almost full as the NHS faces one of the worst flu outbreaks in a decade. Some hospitals have only one or two life-support machines left and critically ill patients are being transferred by ambulance to other trusts.... >snip< Senior doctors report that they are seeing the highest number of flu cases in more than 20 years and expect the situation to worsen over the coming weeks.

[EMBARGOED FOR JAN. 5, 2011] For those infected with the 2009 pandemic influenza A (H1N1) virus, extreme obesity was a powerful risk factor for death, according to an analysis of a public health surveillance database. In a study to be published in the February 1, 2011, issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases, researchers associated extreme obesity with a nearly three-fold increased odds of death from 2009 H1N1 influenza. Half of Californians greater than 20 years of age hospitalized with 2009 H1N1 were obese. (Please see below for a link to the study online.) Data from 500 adults hospitalized with H1N1 in...

The Seasonal Flu Vaccine A seasonal vaccine is distributed routinely every year. •Unlike last flu season, when you needed to get two vaccines, the 2009 H1N1 and the seasonal vaccine, this flu season you only need the seasonal vaccine. •The 2010-2011 flu vaccine protects against an influenza A H3N2 virus, an influenza B virus and the 2009 H1N1 virus that caused so much illness last season.

(NaturalNews) I remember the H1N1 "swine flu" season of 2009 very well. People were rushing out to get vaccinated, scared half to death by the mainstream media which was pushing false reports that the swine flu would kill tens of millions of people and that only a vaccine could save you. The CDC and health authorities were pushing a double-barreled vaccine strategy that demanded people get both a seasonal flu shot as well as an H1N1 pandemic flu shot. Those who questioned the sensibility of vaccines for fighting the flu were attacked as "baby killers" for not kow-towing to the...

SALT LAKE CITY—Treating virulent influenza, sepsis, and other potentially deadly infections long has focused on looking for ways to kill viruses and bacteria. But new research from the University of Utah and Utah State University shows that modulating the body's own overeager inflammatory response to infection may help save more lives. In a study published March 17 in Science Translational Medicine, researchers led by U of U cardiologist Dean Y. Li, M.D., Ph.D., professor of internal medicine and director of the Molecular Medicine Program, shows that protecting blood vessels from hyper-inflammatory response to infection reduced mortality rates in mouse models...

Taking high doses of vitamin D3 supplements in winter helps reduce risk of acquiring seasonal flu in winter, a new Japanese trial demonstrated. The trial results, reported in the March 10, 2010 issue of American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, show that children given vitamin D(3) supplement were 42 percent less likely to get infected with seasonal flu than those who were given a placebo. The efficacy is remarkable as it may be comparable to that of flu vaccine, which is generally low because the virus used to construct the vaccine is likely different from the circulating one. Deficiency of Vitamin...

A Montbello mother says her 9-year-old son's death from severe asthma could have been prevented had Denver Human Services resolved problems with his Medicaid pharmacy benefits. Zuton Lucero said she called Human Services every three days for months last year when she was suddenly unable to get prescription drugs for her son, Zumante. The boy's health deteriorated without the medication, his doctor said, and he died at Children's Hospital in July after losing consciousness at his house after an attack. "I don't want anyone else to be sitting where I'm sitting," Lucero said. Advocacy lawyers who met Wednesday with the...

Some of you may find this to be a big surprise, but a Harvard study shows that the great swine flu pandemic was oversold. Shocking I know, as one doctor points out, “The H1N1 pandemic was a pandemic that never materialized.” Then I guess you could call the swine flu pandemic oversold, wouldn’t you think? The Harvard study uses the deaths from H1N1 back in the spring and projecting what they would have been in the fall suggests that the swine flu pandemic was indeed oversold by a government willing to allow its citizens to be in a constant state...

Drugmaker MedImmune is recalling nearly 5 million doses of H1N1 flu vaccine because the nasal spray appears to lose strength over time, federal health officials announced Tuesday. The vaccine recall is the second this month caused by declining potency and comes as public health officials urge millions of Americans to get vaccinated against swine flu. The action affects more than 4.6 million doses, but the vast majority have already been used, according to the Food and Drug Administration. Agency officials said the vaccine was strong enough when it was distributed in October and November.

Milwaukee, WI – Researchers from the Medical College of Wisconsin, the Children's Research Institute, and the Children's Hospital of Wisconsin have developed a rapid, automated system to differentiate strains of influenza. The related report by Beck et al, "Development of a rapid automated influenza A, influenza B, and RSV A/B multiplex real-time RT-PCR assay and its use during the 2009 H1N1 swine-origin influenza virus (S-OIV) epidemic in Milwaukee, Wisconsin," appears in the January 2010 issue of the Journal of Molecular Diagnostics. In pandemic infection, such as the present H1N1 influenza outbreak, rapid automated tests are needed in order to make...

A nurse herself for many years, the 47-year-old Milliken has spent the last 38 days in medical care. Her boyfriend and family said she may have been struck down by what's called Guillain-Barre Syndrome -- which starts with pain and ends with paralysis. Milliken's family said they believe the H1N1 flu shot she received in the first week of November may be to blame for her suffering. "Right now, she's in a lot of pain, mostly in her extremities. A lot of nerve sensations such as burning in her legs is what she's feeling," said Milliken's daughter Michelle Mellett. The...

MADISON — The specter of a drug-resistant form of the deadly H5N1 avian influenza is a nightmare to keep public health officials awake at night. Now, however, a study published this week (Dec. 21) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) suggests that a new compound, one on the threshold of final testing in humans, may be more potent and safer for treating "bird flu" than the antiviral drug best known by the trade name Tamiflu. Known as T-705, the compound even works several days after infection, according to Yoshihiro Kawaoka, a University of Wisconsin-Madison virologist and...

Investigators identify host factors that help multiple influenza strains thrive and could be targeted for new antiviralsA JOLLA, Calif., December 21, 2009 -- Investigators at Burnham Institute for Medical Research (Burnham), Mount Sinai School of Medicine (Mount Sinai), the Salk Institute for Biological Studies (Salk) and the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation (GNF) have identified 295 human cell factors that influenza A strains must harness to infect a cell, including the currently circulating swine-origin H1N1. The team also identified small molecule compounds that act on several of these factors and inhibit viral replication, pointing to new ways to...

f you've been waiting to get a swine flu shot, here's your chance. New Hampshire Public Health Director Dr. Jose Montero announced yesterday that anyone over the age of 6 months may receive a swine flu vaccine. The shot had previously been limited to people in high-risk groups, such as pregnant women, health care workers and those with a serious health condition. "The supply has caught up with the demand and allowed us to move forward," said Montero. "I know it has been difficult to wait, but it has been the right thing to do to protect the people of...

CHICAGO (Reuters) – U.S. researchers have discovered antiviral proteins in cells that naturally fight off influenza infections, a finding that may lead to better ways to make vaccines and protect people against the flu. They said a family of genes act as cell sentries that guard cells from an invading influenza virus, the team reported on Thursday in the journal Cell. "This prevents the virus from even getting into the cell," said Stephen Elledge of Harvard Medical School and a Howard Hughes Investigator at Brigham & Women's Hospital. "It is out there fighting the flu all of the time," Elledge...

ATLANTA (AP) - Health officials are recalling hundreds of thousands of doses of swine flu vaccine after tests indicated they may not be potent enough to protect against the virus. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notified doctors about the recall Tuesday. The recall involves about 800,000 doses made by Sanofi Pasteur. The doses are pre-filled syringes intended for young children, ages 6 months to almost three years. Health officials recommend children those ages get two doses, spaced about a month apart. Health officials say it's not clear how many doses have already been given, but they don't think...

Hey, stop worrying about a massive government takeover of health care. You’re in good hands: Health officials are recalling hundreds of thousands of doses of swine flu vaccine after tests indicated they may not be potent enough to protect against the virus. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notified doctors about the recall Tuesday. The recall involves about 800,000 doses made by Sanofi Pasteur. The doses are pre-filled syringes intended for young children, ages 6 months to almost three years. …Health officials say it’s not clear how many doses have already been given, but they don’t think children need...

800,000 Doses Of Kids' H1N1 Vaccine Recalled ATLANTA (CBS) ― Health officials are recalling hundreds of thousands of doses of swine flu vaccine after tests indicated they may not be potent enough to protect against the virus. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notified doctors about the recall Tuesday. The recall involves about 800,000 doses made by Sanofi Pasteur. The doses are pre-filled syringes intended for young children, ages 6 months to almost three years. Health officials recommend children those ages get two doses, spaced about a month apart. Health officials say it's not clear how many doses have...

A Tennessee woman is learning to walk again after she came down with a deadly nerve disease only eight days after receiving the swine-flu vaccine. Clarksville resident Suzanne Hogan is recovering at Vanderbilt University Medical Center's Stallworth Rehabilitation Center from Guillain-Barre Syndrome, or GBS, an illness she believes is associated with the H1N1 vaccination. GBS attacks the lining of the nerves, causing paralysis and inability to breathe, and can be fatal. Symptoms may include "pins and needles" sensations in fingers and toes; weakness or tingling in legs and upper body; inability to walk; difficulty with eye movement, facial movement, speaking,...

As I have been stating all along on this website, the CDC was lying about there being no mutation of the H1N1 virus. Utah woman died of mutated H1N1 strain"...A 28-year-old Utah woman who died this summer of H1N1 swine flu had a mutated form of the novel virus." (...) "...It was so minor, she said, that the CDC didn't notify the state of the mutation. The health department instead asked about the case after learning of it from a blog." The headlines in the summer: August 21, 2009 H1N1 flu virus hasn't mutated, CDC officials reportSeptember 25, 2009 Swine...

LONDON - Swine flu is far less dangerous than originally feared, British officials said Thursday — about 100 times less lethal than the 1918 Spanish flu. To determine how deadly the virus is, the British health department tracked all reported swine flu patients hospitalized between July and November. In a paper published online in the British journal, BMJ, experts estimated that out of every 100,000 infected people in Britain, about 26 died.

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.

December 8, 2009 The man with the nickname “Dr Flu”, Professor Albert Osterhaus, of the Erasmus University in Rotterdam Holland has been named by Dutch media researchers as the person at the center of the worldwide Swine Flu H1N1 Influenza A 2009 pandemic hysteria. Not only is Osterhaus the connecting person in an international network that has been described as the Pharma Mafia, he is THE key advisor to WHO on influenza and is intimately positioned to personally profit from the billions of euros in vaccines allegedly aimed at H1N1.

A new analysis, using H1N1 deaths in the United States in the spring and projecting likely outcomes for this fall, shows that a typical -- or possibly even a milder flu season than average -- should have been expected. The finding begs the question: Has swine flu been oversold? The new study, done by researchers at Harvard University and the Medical Research Council Biostatistics Unit in the U.K., says swine flu cases in the spring indicated a flu season that might be, at worst, slightly worse than normal. "It would have been great to have that back in June," said...

  Déjà Vu for Obama Too:The H1N1 FiascoDecember 9, 2009 When I was growing up, my mother’s most repeated words of advice were: “Watch out, those words may come back to bite you” and “If you can’t fix it, then just leave it alone”. Mom was just warning me about the pitfalls of ignorant babble and clueless meddling. And so I present to you Obama aka “the clueless wrecking ball”. Or to rekindle John Kerry’s 2004 invectives, “If you can't get flu vaccines to Americans, how are you going to protect them against bioterrorism?”...“If you can't get flu vaccines to Americans, what kind of health...

Swine flu strikes isolated North Korea By HYUNGJIN KIM, Associated Press Writer - 1 hour 58 minutes ago SEOUL, South Korea – Swine flu has struck isolated North Korea, the regime acknowledged Wednesday, although it was unclear whether there were any fatalities from the virus that has been circling the globe for months. North Korea made its first acknowledgment of an H1N1 outbreak with a short dispatch in state media citing nine confirmed cases in northwestern Sinuiju on the Chinese border and in Pyongyang, the capital. The official Korean Central News Agency reported that a quarantine system to prevent the...

Around one million doses of Tamiflu have so far been given out, but according to the figures, hundreds of thousands of packets could have been wasted as most people with symptoms of flu did not have the H1N1 pandemic virus. Random swabs taken by the Health Protection Agency show that four out of five people calling the National Pandemic Flu Service with symptoms of the disease, did not test positive for it. At the end of the first wave of the pandemic in Britain, just one in twenty people calling the flu line with symptoms tested positive. It has led...

Bird influenza viruses have a variety of strategies to cross the species barrier and spreadThe 2009 H1N1 influenza virus used a new strategy to cross from birds into humans, a warning that it has more than one trick up its sleeve to jump the species barrier and become virulent. In a report in this week's early online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, University of California, Berkeley, researchers show that the H1N1, or swine flu, virus adopted a new mutation in one of its genes distinct from the mutations found in previous flu viruses, including...

Results from 34 swine flu victims in New York were released by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in a December 7 bulletin. The swine flu symptoms and effects on the lungs of the victims were similar to the effects of the 1918 Spanish flu, which had an extremely high mortality rate around the world. Other reports of H1N1 infections deep in the lungs have been reported around the world, including Ukraine, China, Brazil, Norway, and the United States, in Iowa and Utah. These infections have been linked to a change in the receptor binding domain of the virus. Swine...

World Health Organization scientists are suspected of accepting secret bribes from vaccine manufacturers to influence the U.N. organization's H1N1 pandemic declaration, according to Danish and Swedish newspapers. Meanwhile, pharmaceutical profits from swine-flu related drugs have soared – with earnings between $10 billion and $15 billion in 2009, investment bank JP Morgan estimates. As WND reported, the WHO Director General Margaret Chan initially raised the influenza pandemic alert to its second highest level in May – but evidence reveals the agency may have made it easier to classify the flu outbreak as a pandemic by changing its definition to omit "enormous...

Liza Northrop Beale, the general manager of The Almanac, a weekly newspaper in Washington, Pa. died Saturday of complications related to the H1N1 virus. She was 49 and lived in Peters Township which is suburban Pittsburgh.

'The obvious risk is of H5N1 combining with the pandemic [H1N1] virus' Virologists and influenza authorities are becoming increasingly concerned that the 2009 A-H1N1 flu virus could “reassort” with the highly virulent H5N1 avian flu that’s still prevalent in parts of the world like China, and that a mutation could occur resulting in a new strain that has the lethality of H5N1 and the human transmissibility of A-H1N1. The concerns have grown in the wake of revelations that mutations of the H1N1 flu virus had been found in Norway and elsewhere, leading experts to fear that it might just be...

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. ~snip~ Fisman can't understand the rational for continuing mass vaccinations. He said that for a virus as contagious as H1N1, less than 30 per cent of the population needed vaccination to reach a critical level of immunity. ~snip~ Despite that view, Canada's top doctor this week pleaded with Canadians to get vaccinated if they have not already done so....

The Great Influenza pandemic killed as many as 100 million worldwide when the global population was less than a third of what it is today. It killed more people in twenty-four weeks than AIDS has killed in twenty-four years, more people in a year than the Black Death of the Middle Ages in a century. It didn't single out the very young and the very old. Half those who died were young people in the prime of life - in their 20's and 30's. By a bizarre and unprecedented stroke it turned the immune system itself into a killer. Two-thirds...

I have some serious concerns about the yearly shot that most people get during the flu season. It has been many years since I have had a serious cold or the flu.. This year after I had my shot, I came down with serious flu symptoms and it has been hanging on for more than a week. My next door neighbor also came down with the flu after she had her yearly shot, she went to her doctor and confirmed she, indeed, had the flu. I know that that this happens on occasion that the shot can cause the flu...

I've had a hard time locating a flu shot around my locality, and for that matter one cannot find a flu shot in the entire state of New Hampshire unless you belong to a certain group of "at risk" people. More specifically, they are currently offering flu shots to those under 24 with certain underlying health problems. Well it appears that to the south in the people's republic of Massachusetts, both flu shots are available to anyone. Could it be that there are politics behind the availability of flu vaccine? Are democratic lives more valuable than those of somewhat more...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - One of the most systematic looks yet at the swine flu pandemic confirms that it is at worst only a little more serious than an average flu season and could well be a good deal milder, researchers said on Monday. ... Lipsitch's team calculated a potential range of 7,800 to 29,000 deaths. This compares to seasonal flu, which kills 36,000 people a year and puts 200,000 into the hospital.

NURISTAN PROVINCE, Afghanistan, Dec. 1, 2009 – Nuristan Provincial Reconstruction Team servicemembers recently took to the airwaves to combat misinformation about the spread of the H1N1 flu virus here. Navy Lt. Jennifer Dreiling, a senior medical officer for the Nuristan Provincial Reconstruction Team, records a radio message on Radio Kalagush, a U.S.-funded Afghan radio station that broadcasts from Forward Operating Base Kalagush in eastern Afghanistan’s Nuristan province, educating locals about the H1N1 flu virus, Nov. 19, 2009. U.S. Air Force photo by 2nd Lt. Natassia Cherne  (Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available. Navy Lt. Jennifer Dreiling, team senior medical officer...

COLUMBIA, Mo. – With flu season in full swing and the threat of H1N1 looming, demand for vaccines is at an all-time high. Although those vaccines are expected to be effective, University of Missouri researchers have found further evidence that some over-the-counter drugs, such as aspirin and Tylenol, that inhibit certain enzymes could impact the effectiveness of vaccines. “If you’re taking aspirin regularly, which many people do for cardiovascular treatment, or acetaminophen (Tylenol) for pain and fever and get a flu shot, there is a good chance that you won’t have a good antibody response,” said Charles Brown, associate professor...