Not fair at all

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Drugmakers rush back into market for vaccines

Malaria. Tuberculosis. Alzheimer's disease. AIDS. Pandemic flu. Genital herpes. Urinary tract infections. Grass allergies. Traveler's diarrhea. You name it, the pharmaceutical industry is working on a vaccine to prevent it.

Many could be on the market in five years or less.

Contrast that with five years ago, when so many companies had abandoned the vaccine business that half the U.S. supply of flu shots was lost because of contamination at one of the two manufacturers left.

Drug makers rush flu vaccines

With swine flu now an official pandemic, the race is on among drug makers to produce a vaccine.

After the World Health Organization declared a global flu epidemic, GlaxoSmithKline said Thursday that it would be ready within weeks to begin large-scale vaccine production in Canada and Germany.

Sanofi-Aventis has started working on its own version. Australia's CSL expects to have the first batches of its shot ready by mid-August.

Different doses for fighting flu

The emergence of the H1N1 swine flu has added urgency to what has become an annual ritual for millions of Americans: getting a flu shot. The good news is that scientists have developed a vaccine against the H1N1 virus. But it is taking much longer than expected to produce the hundreds of millions of doses the government had planned to distribute. And it is still too soon to know how effective the vaccine will be in preventing swine flu.

In all likelihood, we'd have a better H1N1 vaccine -- and more of it -- if in our preparations we had accounted for the biological differences between men and women.

Under the current guidelines, men and women are to get equal-sized doses of the H1N1 vaccine. Yet women's bodies generate a stronger antibody response than men's do, research shows, so less vaccine may be needed to immunize them. If we could give women a smaller dose, there would be more vaccine to go around. And we might also spare them the mild side effects that vaccines can cause, like pain at the injection

Protection

At the rate H1NI flu vaccine is showing up at clinics in North Carolina, a swine flu shot could be high on people's Christmas lists. It wasn't supposed to be this way, but a national shortage of the anti-influenza vaccine has made the flu's return this fall an exercise in patience.

That's true for people who want to increase their chances of avoiding influenza (almost everyone) and for the medical and public health officials who have had to tell telephone callers and e-mailers, over and over, that there aren't yet sufficient supplies of vaccine on hand.

Under the circumstances, officials were right to focus on getting the highest priority groups - pregnant women most of all - vaccinated first.

Flu fright

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CORRECTION

A caption on the front of the Q section Sunday should not have indicated that researchers were checking how much flu virus was present in the samples shown. The researchers were working with a virus that was not influenza. A caption inside the section should not have identified the cells a Duke assistant professor, Elizabeth Ramsburg, was splitting as flu cells.