Vaccines

Los Angeles public health officials say they expect to receive the first shipments of H1N1 flu vaccine this week. Local clinics and doctor's offices will receive small shipments of the FluMist nasal spray vaccine as soon as Wednesday, according to a statement released Friday from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health. "While the FluMist nasal spray vaccine may not be appropriate for everyone, we do encourage those who can receive this form of the vaccine to get it," said Jonathan E. Fielding, the county's director of public health.

In years past, the nation's attempts to prevent flu-related deaths have focused on limiting transmission of the virus through widespread vaccination programs. This year, with school starting up well before a vaccine for the pandemic H1N1 influenza virus will be available, there will be little that can slow the spread of the virus for the next few months.

Government health officials said Tuesday that they were "looking intently" at developing a swine flu vaccine. "It will be a matter of deciding not to make a vaccine rather than deciding to move forward," said Dr. Richard Besser, acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But undertaking work on a vaccine would be challenging. In a typical year, formulating the nation's flu vaccine is a tricky proposition. This is not a typical year.

In a major setback for the fight to link autism to vaccines, a special federal court ruled Thursday that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine and vaccines that contained a mercury-based preservative were not connected to the autism that developed in three children.

London-based GlaxoSmithKline won U.S. approval to sell its vaccine to fight H1N1 influenza, also known as swine flu, after an eight-week delay. The Food and Drug Administration cleared the vaccine as a strain change to Glaxo's FluLaval seasonal flu vaccine, the drug maker said Tuesday in an e-mailed statement. The U.S. Health and Human Services Department has ordered 7.6 million doses of the swine flu vaccine as part of about 250 million doses secured from all manufacturers, the company said.

A controversial prostate cancer vaccine that previously had been rejected by the Food and Drug Administration improves survival of patients with the advanced form of the disease more than existing treatments and should be brought to market, researchers said Tuesday.

The prevalence of autism in California children continued to rise after most vaccine manufacturers started to remove the mercury-based preservative thimerosal in 1999, suggesting that the chemical was not a primary cause of the disorder, according to a study released Monday. The analysis found that from 2004 to 2007, when exposure to thimerosal dropped significantly for 3 to 5 year olds, the autism rate continued to increase in that group from 3.0 to 4.1 per 1,000 children.

New studies in infants show that the mercury used as a preservative in vaccines is cleared from the body at least 10 times faster than researchers had previously believed, a finding that casts further doubt on the theory that the preservative causes autism. Researchers had believed that the ethyl mercury in the preservative thimerosal is metabolized in much the same way as the methyl mercury found in fish and other sources.

Health authorities here have launched a massive vaccination campaign as a yellow fever outbreak has panicked residents and sparked fierce criticism of the government's handling of the crisis. Almost 1 million people have been vaccinated in this landlocked nation of 6.5 million, officials said. An aircraft carrying 2 million additional doses of vaccine from France touched down Sunday, local media reported.

Officials with the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention scrambled Thursday to reassure the public that childhood vaccines were safe after news spread that an agency had acknowledged a link between a child's autism and the shots she received as a toddler. "Our message to parents is that immunization is life- saving," Dr. Julie L. Gerberding, the CDC's director, said at a hastily convened conference call with reporters. "There's nothing changed. . . .