MILVAX, or vaccines.mil, is the military’s vaccination related website. It includes this crossword puzzle and a variety of other interesting stuff, like a map of regional analysts. I’m sure people like Lyle are hip to this, but I was quite impressed, given the generally sad state of web resources in this domain. That is, of course, coming from citizen weirdness like this…
NIAID unveiled today a multicenter flu research initiative.
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The FDA advisory committee endorsed yesterday an experimental human vaccine for a strain of the H5N1 avian influenza virus. The vaccine seems to provide a protection of only 45%. According to the NYT, it requires 12 times the dose of antigen delivered by a typical shot for seasonal influenza and it has to be given in two shots several weeks apart…
Stephen Flynn did a series for NPR this week called The Edge of Disaster that would be worth a listen. One of the themes is that reduced attention to population security has also increased vulnerability of vital systems, as this nice diary from DailyKos points out in relation to avian flu.
Indonesia has agreed to send samples of avian influenza viral strains to the WHO as soon as it has access to affordable vaccines. It will be interesting to see to what kind of benefit-sharing model this will lead. Anthropologists in Indonesia, please inquire!
A conference hosted by the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) is now underway with the purpose of bringing together business leaders and risk executives from industry to talk about ways to plan for a pandemic flu outbreak. We at ARC have had little in the way of concerted discussion about preparedness in the private sector — at least, I’ve not been aware of much chatter about it on our end.
As good second-order observers, we have probably noted that interesting distinctions have been made regarding “where” preparedness occurs. This emergent assemblage finds its most concrete form in the activities and practices located, at least in a certain sense, in the domains of public health, emergency management, and increasingly, homeland security. It is interesting that this assemblage works with and reifies distinctions between all this, and the private sector. In the American context, it seems that there exists a kind of rehashing of familiar debates about what “the state” can do, and what can and must be left to the private sector — as well as, for that matter, non-profits (have a look here for a recent report on Bay Area non-profits and disaster non-readiness). Hurricane Katrina, as we recall, produced the now-familiar mantra that “we [i.e., the state] can’t do everything” — which a truism, but an interesting one. Still we might ask, strictly as a matter of critical inquiry: why not?
Anyway, this is a ramble, but it’s headed, I think, towards the following question: Where are the fault lines between public and private in the context of preparedness and vital systems? Is this distinction valid, empirically? I think conceptual work in this area is crucial.
This is an important piece of research, published today in Science: A Two–Amino Acid Change in the Hemagglutinin of the 1918 Influenza Virus Abolishes Transmission. It is a major step forward in the understanding of transmission of influenza viruses among mammals.
There has never been such a thing in language, but now it exists! As Dr. Martin S. Cetron, director of global migration and quarantine for the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said: “We have to be prepared for a Category 5 pandemic.” As it turns out, the new guidelines for pandemic influenza are now modelled on the five levels of hurricanes. A strange twist of language that provides food for thought for the anthropologist of the contemporary!
Hungarian authorities on Wednesday [24 Jan 2007] reported an outbreak
of H5N1 avian influenza in the southeast of the country, the 1st instance of the virus in the EU since August 2006.
As the New York Times reports today, “Scientists infected monkeys with a virus that caused the 1918-19 influenza pandemic and said in the Jan. 18 issue of the journal Nature that it caused an illness like that suffered by patients with the bird flu now spreading in Asia.” Read the rest of this entry »