When New Jersey became the first state to require a flu vaccine for children in 2008, parents protested outside the State House. 1 The new mandate requires children between six months and five years old to get an annual flu shot to attend a child care facility or day care center. 2 According to state epidemiologist Dr. Eddy Bresnitz, New Jersey based its decision to require flu vaccines for pre...

BACKGROUND Current influenza vaccines, based on antibodies against surface antigens, are unable to provide protection against newly emerging virus strains which differ from the vaccine strains. Therefore the population has to be re-vaccinated annually. It is thus important to develop vaccines which induce protective immunity to a broad spectrum of influenza viruses. This trial is designed to ev...

BACKGROUND The 2009 H1N1 pandemic viruses are genetically similar to A/New Jersey/76 H1N1 virus (NJ/76), the strain selected for the 1976 "swine flu" vaccines. Approximately 45 million people in the United States were vaccinated against NJ/76 30 years ago, but the impact of this nationwide immunization on the current pandemic is largely unknown. METHODS Archived human serum samples collected ...

BACKGROUND The first cases of influenza A/H1N1 (swine flu) were confirmed in the UK on 27th April 2009, after a novel virus first identified in Mexico rapidly evolved into a pandemic. The swine flu outbreak was the first pandemic in more than 40 years and for many, their first encounter with a major influenza outbreak. This study examines public understandings of the pandemic, exploring how peo...

From Edward Jenner’s breakthrough discovery in 1796 that inoculating an eight-year-old boy with cowpox sores protected him against smallpox, the field of vaccinology has come a long way. Today, vaccine design often begins with researchers scouring the DNA sequences of pathogens to exhume buried targets that might trigger a robust immune response in people. Once identified, such targets become t...

Vaccination, one of the most effective and cost-efficient strategy in preventing and controlling influenza virus infection, also has poorly immunogenicity and side effects. Thus, adjuvants are employed to augment the immune response and overcome the drawbacks of vaccine. Here, we present a novel Toll-like receptor agonist (SZU101, T7) to evaluate the adjuvanticity for inactivated H1N1 influenza...

Less than half of gay and bisexual men indicated they had received some doses of hepatitis B virus vaccine. Hepatitis B virus vaccination was higher among men who were 18 to 29 years old (compared to those 50-59 years old), gay, or had received flu vaccine within the last year.