Vaccines

Glynndana Shevlin awoke Oct. 30 with a runny nose and scratchy throat, worried she might have the flu. But the full-time food and beverage concierge at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim has no paid sick days, and if her absences stack up, she faces discipline. So like many others in the service industry, Shevlin, 49, weighed her options and reported to work sick. "I thought I could make it," said Shevlin, who has worked at the hotel for 21 years. Four hours into her shift -- and after several trips to the bathroom to retch -- Shevlin asked to leave early.

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.

Re "Research can't link autism, mercury," Jan. 8 As a speech and language pathologist, I have worked with many families whose children had autism. A child's limited ability to interact and use language appropriately is a difficult aspect of the disorder. Studies continue to show that vaccines are not to blame for autism. Unfortunately, with human research it is impossible to factor everything involved, but focusing on the effect of one thing at a time has not found the culprit. Perhaps we should be looking at something different.

Vaccines aren't just for kids, but far too few grown-ups are rolling up their sleeves, disappointed federal health officials reported Wednesday. The numbers of the newly vaccinated are surprisingly low, considering how much public attention a trio of new shots -- which protect against shingles, whooping cough and cervical cancer -- have received. Yet many people seem to have missed, or forgotten, the news: A survey by the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases found that aside from the flu, most adults have trouble naming diseases that they could prevent with a simple inoculation.

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. . . .

Last month, an advisory panel at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that all children 6 months and over get the influenza vaccine every year. Currently, children ages 5 to 17 are not included in such recommendations, unless they also have certain health conditions such as asthma and heart disease. Many parents may be wondering: Is this necessary? And how will it help my child? Why did the panel decide to alter the vaccine recommendations? One rationale for universal vaccination is so-called herd immunity.

The two-decade search for an AIDS vaccine is in crisis after two field tests of the most promising contender not only did not protect people from the virus but may have put them at increased risk of becoming infected. The trials, which enrolled volunteers on four continents, have spurred intense scientific inquiry and unprecedented soul-searching as researchers try to make sense of what happened and assess whether they should have seen it coming.

A small trial of an experimental vaccine designed to activate the immune system against breast cancer suggests it may reduce the risk of death for most patients, U.S. military researchers said Sunday. The vaccine, designed to treat women with tumors that generate a protein called HER-2, has been licensed to privately held Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Apthera Inc. under the brand name NeuVax.