Swine Flu Vaccine Recall

Vaccine maker Sanofi-Aventis is recalling four lots of its pediatric H1N1 swine flu vaccine because it is not as potent as it should be, U.S. officials said. A spokesman for the CDC said the recall represents less than 1% of the more than 95 million vaccine doses available for order in the U.S. by the states. The recalled vaccine is specifically packaged for use in children ages 6 months to nearly 3 years. There is no safety concern and children vaccinated from the lots already will not need to be re-vaccinated, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. The CDC said the four lots were discovered as part of a quality assurance testing program and that the company had also notified the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Also Canadian doctors have been advised not to use a batch of 170,000 swine flu vaccines after six reports of serious allergic reactions among recipients, but there are no similar reports from other countries, pharmaceuticals company GlaxoSmithKline stated. Authorities routinely monitor vaccines for any signals of problems, such as the allergic reactions that do occur, rarely, every year. Six people in Canada had suffered an allergic reaction, the batch contained about 170,000 doses. It was not immediately clear how many had been administered, although Vail said the majority had been.

Despite the recall, the CDC said the vaccine lots in question do not pose any safety risk. The agency added that children who received the vaccine do not need to be revaccinated, as the vaccine should still be effective against the virus.

Cure for Sickle Cell

Sickle cell disease, which affects primarily people of African descent, is caused by a genetic mutation that gives red blood cells a sickle shape, hindering their ability to carry oxygen and causing them to clog blood vessels. It can cause stroke, severe pain and organ damage -- especially to the lungs, kidneys and liver -- and can be fatal.

Researchers have for the first time performed a successful bone marrow transplant to cure sickle cell disease in adults, a feat that could expand the procedure to more of the 70,000 Americans with the disease and possibly some other diseases as well.

About 200 children have been cured of sickle cell with transplants, but the procedure was considered too harsh for adults with severe sickle cell disease. Now a team from the National Institutes of Health and Johns Hopkins University is reporting today in the New England Journal of Medicine that it has developed a much-less-toxic transplant procedure and used it to cure nine of the first 10 patients studied.

Ineffective Cancer Drugs Made Effective

Medical scientists at University of Oklahoma found a way to turn ineffective new cancer drugs into efficient cancer fighters. Researchers at the university's Health Sciences use their patented chemical compound SHetA2 to "trick" cancer cells into responding to new treatments and undergoing cell suicide.

This discovery means that we can use our non-toxic cancer prevention pill to improve treatment for people who already have cancer. The new chemotherapy drugs are antibodies that bind to cell surface receptors called 'death receptors. The binding of the antibodies activates the death receptors in cancer cells and causes cell suicide with little harm to normal cells. Many cancers, however, are resistant to the antibodies. SHetA2 treatment can make ovarian and kidney cancer cells sensitive to the death receptor antibodies and kill the cancer.

The research appears in the journal Gynecologic Oncology.

US medical Mammogram Recommendation

The heads of a high-level US medical panel acknowledged Wednesday they "fumbled the message" about when women should begin having routine screening mamograms in a controversial report last month. "We communicated very poorly," Diana Petitti, vice chair of the US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF), said during an hours-long grilling by lawmakers about the report, which caused a firestorm when it was published in a medical journal two weeks ago.

In the report, the task force said there was "evidence that the net benefit of having regular screening mamograms was small for women aged 40 to 49." It recommended that regular mammograms to screen for breast cancer start at 50 instead of the currently recommended 40 and that women have them every two years instead of annually.

The advise was almost immediately denounced by doctors who warned that if it were followed more women would die from breast cancer, which already claims some 40,000 lives a year in the United States. Petitti agreed that one of the task force's main recommendations was that women age 50-74 should have a mamogram every other year, but was less unequivocal than the report that women start routine breast cancer screening later in life.