The Centre for Infectious Disease Control (CIb) of the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) has compiled a chronological overview of that country’s response to the 2009 influenza A(H1N1) pandemic.
This paper and review from a Singapore-based group compared results obtained for estimating rates of new infections during the 2009 pandemic. They derived rates from paired specimens from the same patient (serum cohort approach), cross-sectional serological surveys, rates of unconfirmed syndromic influenza-like-illness (ILI) obtained from primary care physicians in sentinel general practices, and combined clinical repos with laboratory confirmed samples.
This collection of article is intended to clarify the issues that arose, during the 2009 pandemic around definitions of the pandemic term, both in a theoretical and practical way.
A multinational European team has reported the isolation of a human monoclonal antibody that can seemingly bind to and neutralize representative of all the known sub-types classes of influenza A haemagglutinins (HAs). This is the first such report of such an antibody.
EMA recommends restricting use in persons under 20 years of age Pandemrix to be used only in the absence of seasonal trivalent influenza vaccines, following link to very rare cases of narcolepsy in young people. Overall benefit-risk remains positive.
On 21 July 2011 the Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP) of the European Medicines Agency (EMA) issued its opinion on the review of Pandemrix® and reports on narcolepsy. The CHMP recommended that in persons under 20 years of age Pandemrix® may only be used if the recommended seasonal trivalent influenza vaccine is not available and if immunisation against H1N1 is still needed (e.g. in persons at risk of the complications of infection).
The European Food Standard Agency has recently published a call for proposals for a methodological framework for potentially pandemic influenza strains.