Vaccines

People who ate chunks of a gene-engineered potato developed defenses against a diarrhea germ, raising doctors' hopes of one day being able to vaccinate people with fruits and vegetables instead of needles. The researchers didn't test whether the vaccine actually gave protection. They just wanted to see if it could survive the digestive system and spur the body into making the proper defenses. Apparently, it did.

The Food and Drug Administration on Monday approved the first vaccine, co-developed by a UC Irvine researcher, to prevent debilitating Lyme disease, the nation's most common tick-borne ailment and an increasingly serious problem in California, the Midwest and the Northeast.

The Food and Drug Administration on Monday approved the first vaccine to prevent debilitating Lyme disease, the nation's most common tick-borne ailment and an increasingly serious problem in California, the Midwest and the Northeast.

A U.S. doctors' group recommended Wednesday that children be vaccinated with an injectable "killed" form of the polio virus to prevent a rarer form of the disease caused by the live virus vaccine given orally. The American Academy of Pediatrics said in its news magazine, AAP News, that children should receive the killed form of the polio virus via injection at infancy.

The long list of mandated vaccines for public school pupils will grow next year, when seventh-graders will be required to be immunized against hepatitis B. Under a state law that takes effect in July, students cannot enter, advance to or repeat the seventh grade if they have not received the vaccine. But that means parents must get started right away: The vaccine is given in three doses over a six-month period.

Two newly developed vaccines against Lyme disease are probably equally effective, according to final reports on large-scale testing of the competing products published today in the New England Journal of Medicine. The two vaccines are similar but not identical. They are LYMErix, produced by SmithKline Beecham, and ImuLyme, made by Pasteur Merieux Connaught. Both vaccines require three shots and take a year to reach full effectiveness.

Chiron Corp. said the European Patent Office revoked a patent issued to Medeva's Evans Medical Ltd. that had threatened the sale of one of Chiron's vaccines. The patent office found that an Evans patent on a component included in Chiron's new whooping cough vaccine is "not valid," Chiron said. The vaccine is part of a new, safer generation of whooping cough treatments known as acellular pertussis vaccines.

VaxGen Inc., a small biotechnology company, has not yet received approval from the Food and Drug Administration to begin human trials of an AIDS vaccine later this year, the company said Monday. The $20-million VaxGen study would involve 7,500 healthy volunteers and would take about three years to complete, company spokeswoman Donna Walters said. If successful, the vaccine could be available to the public early in the next century.

In a confidential report to be finalized today, investigators for the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services allege that the county's top epidemiologist failed to obtain the permission of--or even notify--his superiors before committing public resources to a federal research project designed to lay the groundwork for testing future AIDS vaccines. The investigators also say that Dr.

Researchers are under heavy pressure from the Pentagon to complete work on an experimental vaccine to protect soldiers against deadly botulism, an organism believed to be part of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's biological weapons arsenal, the scientists said Wednesday. Researchers at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, in collaboration with scientists at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Frederick, Md.