Vaccine

The memo from state health officials went out last month to some Pennsylvania veterinarians. The news about rabies, it said, was "not good. " For the third straight year, Pennsylvania will likely top all other states in reported cases of rabies in domestic animals. Through November, the state reported 70 cases, surpassing its 2009 total of 65. "I am fairly sure our title will be held for a third year running of most rabid domestic animals in the U.S.," a regional veterinarian with the state's Department of Agriculture said in the memo.

State agriculture officials are urging South Jersey residents to get proper vaccine shots for their horses because of an illness that took the life of a horse in Waterford Township last week. The 1-year-old filly, which officials refused to identify to protect its owners, died from equine encephalitis, a disease that predominantly strikes horses and pheasants. The disease is contracted through mosquitoes that have preyed on wild, infected birds. No cases of the illness were reported in New Jersey last year, but the state - especially the southern end - has historically been hit hard by it. A few years ago, 26 horses in the state died of equine encephalitis.

The Tri-State Animal Emergency Center in Woolwich Township, Gloucestor County, will hold an emergency parvovirus vaccine clinic for dog owners on Saturday, 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. "Parvovirus is a very scary disease because it strikes quickly and is often fatal," said Dr. Mark Magazu, medical director at the South Jersey center. "We're seeing a dramatic increase this year in incidents of parvo in our area, and as a community of pet owners we really have got to control this thing. It's a miserable disease that causes affected dogs to suffer horribly.

A science watchdog group yesterday accused the Agriculture Department of licensing a new pig vaccine without sufficient testing of whether it could infect humans with an untreatable animal disease known as the "mad itch" that can kill within 48 hours of infection. The vaccine, which is the first genetically engineered vaccine to be licensed for commercial sale, was extensively tested last year in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan. It is being marketed in those three states and in Indiana, Nebraska and Iowa.

The American scientists most likely to develop a vaccine against AIDS were summoned to the National Institutes of Health this week to assess their progress and report on what still has to be done. Seated around a huge conference table and on tiered seats bordering it on three sides, 150 of the nation's brightest scientists exchanged data, challenged each other's theories and proposed tactics that might help stop the epidemic of acquired immune deficiency syndrome, which has struck more than 23,000 Americans, killing half of them.

Robert Austrian, 90, a maverick researcher who ignored the hubris of the medical community after the discovery of penicillin and developed a vaccine for a bacterium that kills many pneumonia victims, died of a stroke last Sunday at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Austrian, a world-renowned researcher of infectious disease and a Penn professor since 1962, lived in Center City. "Antibiotics do not always destroy pneumococcal bacterium in the elderly and victims with compromised immune systems," said John Cohn, an allergy and pulmonary specialist at Thomas Jefferson University.

A Merck & Co. lab technician who stored $21,024 worth of stolen hepatitis B vaccine from the West Point, Montgomery County, pharmaceutical company in her refrigerator pleaded guilty yesterday to 10 counts of receiving stolen property, but did not explain why she had the vaccine. Catherine Brennan's daughter, Aileen Brennan, 22, who also works at Merck, told company security guards about the vaccine. She told police before her mother's Oct. 16 arrest that her mother was mistakenly vaccinating the family against the AIDS virus and sending the vaccine to the poor in Haiti.

The New Jersey Supreme Court yesterday refused to allow the parents of a brain-damaged teenager to sue all of the makers of a vaccine she was given, because the parents did not know which company manufactured the one she took. The justices rejected a theory argued by the parents that each manufacturer should bear responsibility based on its market share of the drug, a vaccine to combat whooping cough. The drug companies argued that their increased liability in this case and others would reduce research and that fewer companies would market the drug.

A Philadelphia neurologist has invented a vaccine aimed at preventing brain damage from stroke. Matthew During of Thomas Jefferson University and a team of scientists report in today's issue of Science that when they gave the vaccine to rats and then induced a stroke, it appeared to reduce the death of brain tissue by about 70 percent. The vaccine is not designed to prevent strokes but is meant to protect the brain against some of the permanent damage that often leaves people paralyzed or impaired in their speech or memory.

College students living in Pennsylvania dorm rooms must be vaccinated against meningitis this fall or sign a waiver indicating they have read about the vaccine's availability and declined immunization. The new law, signed by Gov. Schweiker last week, mirrors similar rules already in place in New Jersey and other states. State Sen. Don White (R., Indiana) introduced the bill after several meningitis cases cropped up among college students last year, including one that caused the death of La Salle University freshman Kerri Bessette.

H Fred Clark, 75, of Center City, a social activist who was one of a trio of Philadelphia scientists whose work on the rotavirus vaccine is credited with saving children's lives worldwide since 2006, died of complications from heart and Parkinson's diseases Saturday, April 28, at Penn Presbyterian Medical Center. The target of the vaccine was rotavirus, "a cause of fever, vomiting and diarrhea and dehydration in young children," said Dr. Paul Offit, who along with Dr. Stanley Plotkin, formed the trio.

WASHINGTON - Federal regulators have approved a vaccine for adults 50 and older to prevent pneumococcal disease, including the most common type of pneumonia. Friday's announcement from the Food and Drug Administration that it had approved Pfizer Inc.'s best-selling Prevnar 13 vaccine for such use was widely anticipated. The approval comes a little more than a month after a panel of federal health experts voted overwhelmingly to recommend Prevnar 13 as a safe and effective vaccine to prevent the bacterial infections in adults.

In the Region $60M deal for Skanska USA Skanska USA Building Inc., a construction-management and design-build company based in Blue Bell, has been awarded a $60 million contract to continue renovation work it began at Janssen Research & Development L.L.C., in Spring House in 2004. The latest project with Janssen, an affiliate of Johnson & Johnson, involves renovation to 180,000 square feet of office space to create modern and progressive laboratory upgrades, Skanska said.

WASHINGTON - Federal health scientists say Pfizer's best-selling vaccine, Prevnar 13, is at least as effective as rival Merck's at helping prevent sometimes deadly infections in adults. Prevnar 13 is intended to reduce the risk of infection by 13 strains of pneumococcal disease, which causes ear infections, meningitis and pneumonia. Vaccination with Prevnar is recommended for all U.S. infants and young children, because of their vulnerability to infection. But the disease also affects 36,000 older adults per year, killing 5,000 of them, according to the latest figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Does it make sense to vaccinate all boys against a sexually transmitted virus that causes a common cancer they are physically incapable of developing? An expert government panel last month concluded the answer is yes. The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommended all U.S. boys ages 11 and 12 be given the cervical cancer prevention vaccine Gardasil, partly to compensate for the "disappointing" usage in girls. The committee's other main rationale was that boys may get some protection of their own because the virus, HPV, is linked to anal cancer.

When he was 17, Ben Kaneda, his six siblings, and their parents were rounded up and sent to the San Joaquin County (Calif.) Fairgrounds. It was May 1942, about six months after the nation entered World War II, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had ordered that Japanese Americans and those of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast be sent to camps guarded by the military. Despite the setback, Mr. Kaneda eventually prospered. On Saturday, Oct. 22, Mr. Kaneda, 86, a developer of pediatric vaccines at Merck & Co. Inc., died of a cerebral aneurysm rupture at Dock Woods, the retirement community in Towamencin Township, Montgomery County, where he had lived since 1995.

WASHINGTON - Should the anthrax vaccine be tested on children? It will be a while longer before the government decides. An advisory board said Friday that ethical issues still needed to be resolved but that if they could be, the vaccine could be tested in children to be sure it's safe and to determine the proper dose in case of a terrorist attack. Because of concerns that terrorists might use the potentially deadly bacterium, the government has stockpiled the vaccine. It has been widely tested on adults.

Malaria seemed closer to being thwarted as a world menace on Tuesday with the news of clinical trial results for a vaccine that would prevent the mosquito-borne disease from killing some of the nearly 800,000 African children it claims each year. "A vaccine is the simplest, most cost-effective way to save lives," said billionaire Bill Gates, cochairman of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which helped fund the research and the clinical trials conducted in seven African countries with 15,460 children.

By Felice J. Freyer, Paul E. Jarris, and Robert M. Pestronk In the recently released movie Contagion , a deadly flu virus originating in bats and pigs spreads to humans worldwide, killing millions and causing chaos. Moving as fast as the virus is misinformation; one character observes that the falsehoods of a self-serving blogger are as dangerous as the virus itself. Public-health officials strive to release the right information at the right time, but they struggle to counter the irresponsible blogger.