Even the most vulnerable people in society won’t be vaccinated against the swine flu until Thanksgiving, according to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. She urged parents and school officials to make backup plans for potential victims of the H1N1 virus. “We’re playing out a whole variety of scenarios,” Sebelius said on CNN’s State of the Union. “We’re preparing for the worst and hoping for the best.” She said that the Obama administration believes that a vaccine will be available around mid-October. “But the regimen will take about five weeks,” Sebelius said, “A first shot, three weeks delay, second shot, and then about two weeks for full immunity. So we’re really need to work between now and Thanksgiving with lots of social mitigation – keeping kids home from school if they’re sick. I would urge every family have a back-up child care plan.” She continued, “If a parent gets sick, what is the plan? because we know the disease spreads quickly and we will not have fully immunized even priority populations until about Thanksgiving. We’re looking at schools as great partners for possible vaccine programs beginning in the fall to get kids immunized as quickly as possible because this is a children’s flu.”

With the number of swine flu deaths doubling over the past few weeks, health officials the world over are pulling out all stops to halt the spread of the virus. In Europe, for example, school officials are extending students’ summer vacations; in several Muslim nations, authorities are telling pregnant women not to attend the hajj, and China is quarantining hundreds of foreign students, The Associated Press reports. The fact that the death toll from the H1N1 virus has risen from 330 in early July to its current level of 700 is reason enough for a new round of dramatic measures, officials say. “We expect to see more cases and deaths in the future,” World Health Organization spokeswoman Aphaluck Bhatiasevi told The Associated Press in Geneva. While the group offered no breakdown of deaths, last week, the United States reported 263 deaths, Canada had 45 deaths and Britain had 29. According to WHO’s last update on July 6, Mexico reported 119 deaths. The fear among experts, however, is that the seemingly astronomical figure of 700 deaths may be far fewer than the actual number of those who’ve died from the virus. “The race is now on to develop and produce a vaccine that is effective against the global swine flu strain, but estimates for when such a jab will be available range from September to December,” according to AP.

AIDS Experts say economy threatens vaccine research

. The current global economic situation could damage funding for AIDS research and vaccine development, said experts at the AIDS Vaccine 2008 conference in Cape Town, South Africa last week. The economic situation has “added to the gloom among experts deeply frustrated by … setbacks” in HIV/AIDS vaccine research, The Associated Press/Los Angeles Times reports. There also are concerns that some groups that are large contributors to health and international development initiatives could reduce funding in light of the economic situation, the AP/Times reports. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said this year’s NIH budget for HIV/AIDS vaccine research is $491 million out of a total HIV/AIDS budget of $1.5 billion. This compares with a $115 million vaccine budget in 1998 out of a total budget of $703 million. Although Fauci said he does not expect the U.S. government to reduce its funding for HIV/AIDS, he added that the “increases in the budget that we had hoped for will not be forthcoming” because of the current financial crisis in the United States. He added that he is concerned the situation could hurt the “enthusiasm and ability of philanthropic research and development.” Alan Bernstein, executive director of the Global HIV Vaccine Enterprise, at the conference said, according to Reuters, that a “downturn in the economy” could “potentially have a negative impact on funding for science in general and HIV vaccine research in particular.” He also emphasized the need for large pharmaceutical companies to invest more into vaccine research.Conference targets health care for Black women. Meharry Medical College just wrapped up a four-day conference in Nashville to find solutions to why African-American women generally do not get the same care as the majority of Americans for HIV/AIDS, breast cancer and obesity. The conference, Meharry officials say, represents collaboration between Meharry Medical College and Heart and Soul magazine, a source of health and fitness information for African-American women. Positive changes are desperately needed when it comes to the issue of women of color and health, conference organizers say. For example, a CDC report on obesity shows that non-Hispanic Black and Mexican-American women were more likely to be obese than White women. Approximately 53 percent of non-Hispanic Black women and 51 percent of Mexican-American women 40 to 59 years of age were obese compared with about 39 percent of non-Hispanic White women of the same age.

A quarter of teen girls have gotten cervical cancer vaccine.  About a quarter of the nation’s teenage girls received the controversial cervical cancer vaccine Gardasil last year in its first full year of distribution, federal authorities said Thursday. “For a new vaccine, 25 percent is really very good,” Lance Rodewald, director of the division of immunization services at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a telephone news conference releasing the data. “We need to see that rate every year if we are going to meet our goal” of having 90 percent of teenagers vaccinated, he said.But immunologist W. Martin Kast of USC’s Keck School of Medicine said, “Twenty-five percent is not bad, but it’s not good either.” He told The Associated Press that the numbers released earlier in the year by Gardasil’s manufacturer, Merck & Co., show that only about 1 percent of Latina teens were receiving the vaccine, and “they are the population that needs it the most” because the frequency of infection is relatively high. Researchers said the percentage of teens receiving two other relatively new vaccines also went up. About 32 percent of teenagers received the meningitis vaccine, up from 20 percent; and 30 percent received the tetanus, diphtheria and whooping cough vaccine, up from 19 percent.  The CDC recommends that girls get the cervical cancer vaccine and that all children get the other two when they are 11 or 12. The vaccine protects against four strains of human papilloma virus that account for about 70 percent of all cases of cervical cancer in the United States. But the vaccine has been criticized on a number of fronts. Some scientists argue that it is only modestly effective and that its safety has not been adequately proved. Conservative groups say that giving it to young girls implies approval of sexual activity. And consumer advocates bemoan its high price – $360 for a series of three shots.
S. Africa quarantines 100. Health authorities in South Africa are on high alert, quarantining more than 100 people who are suspected of coming into contact with a mysterious virus that has killed at least three people in Johannesburg. The World Health Organization has been asked to help South Africa’s health authorities find the cause of the deadly disease. They only became aware of the outbreak after the deaths of a paramedic and a nurse. Both medical attendants treated a woman from Zambia who died with similar symptoms, including internal and external bleeding. Doctors suspect the cause is a hemorrhagic fever, but they have so far failed to make a definitive diagnosis. Authorities have reassured the public that the suspected virus has been contained. More than 100 people are under close medical observation.
Gabrielle Union speaks out about breast cancer. Actress Gabrielle Union is speaking out about breast cancer during Breast Cancer Awareness Month as her best friend struggles with the disease. Read more about why she’s so passionate about the fight against breast cancer at BET.com/Body & Soul.

Measles vaccine doesn’t cause autism, experts say.  The measles-mumps-rubella vaccine causes neither autism nor gastrointestinal disorders, a study found Tuesday, disputing a theory that has persisted for a decade. The theory began in 1998, when British researcher Andrew Wakefield published studies that suggested the measles vaccine caused gastrointestinal problems and that those GI problems led to autism. Co-author W. Ian Lipkin of Columbia University in New York said Wakefield theorized that the virus used in the vaccine grew in the intestinal tract, leading to inflammation that seeped from the bowel into the blood and affected the nervous system, causing autism. In Wednesday’s study, the researchers replicated key parts of Wakefield’s original study and determined that the vaccine neither causes autism or GI problems, said Mady Hornig, a study co-author. Irish pathologist John O’Leary, who co-authored the original study. He and the other researchers looked for evidence of the measles vaccine in children’s intestines after they had been vaccinated and sought to determine if their GI problems and autism symptoms occurred before or after they were vaccinated. After studying 38 children, they found that only one child had trace amounts of the measles virus.

Vital Signs: Basketball star Grant Hill is on a mission to protect you from the flesh-eating bacteria known as MRSA. Why? Vital Signs has the details of his personal experience with the disease.

No HIV vaccine is on the horizon. Combining AIDS-prevention techniques, including condoms, circumcision and possibly drugs now used for treatment, might prevent half of the 7 million to 16 million new infections projected over the next seven years, scientists said. No effective HIV vaccine is available in the near future, and preventive gels called microbicides, aimed at protecting women from infection, have given disappointing results in recent studies, the researchers said. Experimental approaches, such as using antiviral drugs to prevent infections, may change the strategy to stop the disease, said Thomas Coates, a University of California, Los Angeles AIDS researcher, who wrote one of the studies. “We may have to think about how to spend HIV prevention dollars if these trials are as effective as we all think they should be,” he said at a press conference in Mexico City. About 25,000 researchers, advocates, and policymakers are meeting in Mexico at the biennial International AIDS Conference, where the journal was released. Even as increased access to drug treatment helped reduce AIDS deaths about 10 percent to 2 million in 2007, about 2.7 million people were infected that year, according to UNAIDS, the office that coordinates the United Nations’ response to the disease. About 33 million people are infected with the disease worldwide, the agency said. Health officials in Rwanda, Kenya and other African countries are using money from the U.S. government and the Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to increase rates of circumcision in young men. The surgery can reduce the risk a man will catch HIV through having sex with an infected woman by about 60 percent, studies have shown.

Nashville’s Black ministers bolster HIV/AIDS fight
African-American churches around Nashville sent a message to their clergy Sunday by taking an HIV test to let that their congregations know that it’s important for every adult to know their status. The HIV tests were part of the city’s Metro Health Department’s effort to fight HIV/AIDS. They are trying to harness the power and influence of Black churches. The Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated at least 250,000 people in the United States are infected with HIV and are not aware of it. Blacks are 13 percent of the U.S. population but make up 49 percent of AIDS cases. That AIDS is the leading cause of death for Black women ages 25 to 34 and the second-leading cause of death for Black men ages 35 to 44 promoted the ministers to act. The results of the rapid HIV test from the churches were available the same day but given to the test takers over the phone by the Metro Health Department for added privacy.

Should you be concerned about the HPV Vaccine?
Reports of teen paralysis and other problems in connection with the HPV vaccine, which is given to prevent vaginal warts and cancer, have surfaced. Vital Signs asks: Should you be wary of the HPV vaccine? Read more here.