Vaccine for Kids

he U.S. is planning a vaccination campaign that could start in October, with school-age children among the first to be offered a shot, Dow Jones Newswires reports. The new vaccine still has to be developed and tested. But if it works, the government will purchase much of the vaccine. Unlike seasonal flu, which disproportionately affects the elderly, the swine flu has hit particularly hard among school children.

Officials have documented three cases of Tamiflu-resistant swine flu, but they appear to be isolated cases and not evidence of widespread resistance, the WHO said. In one case, testing revealed that a teenage girl who flew from San Francisco to Hong Kong was infected with a Tamiflu-reistant strain, despite the fact that she hadn’t been treated with Tamiflu — suggesting a resistant strain that has the ability to spread from person to person, the New York Times reports. There is no evidence that the resistant strain is widespread, and Tamiflu-resistant flu is susceptible to Relenza, another drug.
The French government is planning to spend nearly $1 billion to buy 100 million doses of vaccine from Sanofi-Aventis, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis and Baxter, reports the French newspaper Le Parisien.