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The United States Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on vaccine issues, voted to approve a new recommendation on  February 24 to offer seasonal influenza vaccination to the whole population aged 6 months and older.

This study updates previous work on modelling the incidence of varicella and Herpes Zoster (HZ) following the introduction of childhood varicella vaccination.

The European Food Standard Agency has recently published a call for proposals for a methodological framework for potentially pandemic influenza strains.

The authors review some of the different systems that are used for assessing vaccination coverage within and outside the EU in order to explore the need for improving vaccination coverage data quality.

The World Health Organization (WHO) recently recommended using the same three flu strains in next year's Southern Hemisphere (SH) vaccine as are in the current Northern Hemisphere vaccine and were used last year in southern hemisphere countries.

Elimination of rubella and prevention of congenital rubella infection in Europe has been a high priority for the WHO European Regional Office over the past decade. In 2010 the WHO regional committee for Europe renewed its commitment to the elimination of rubella and prevention of CRS with a new target of 2015. For Central Europe to reach the target of rubella elimination and prevention of CRS by 2015, very high vaccine coverage levels need to be maintained and catch-up campaigns continued to address susceptible groups, in particular women of child-bearing age. 

It is accompanied by an editorial comment from Maria Zambon of the UK Health Protection Agency add link pleaseThis comprehensive study published by an international group attempts to estimate the global incidence of lower respiratory infections and premature deaths associated with influenza in children younger than 5 years.

The study design and analysis controlled for influence of potentially confounding trends, such as improvement of day-care carriage and decreasing prevalence of smoking during the study period.

This evaluated patients admitted to hospital with laboratory-confirmed or clinically diagnosed influenza A H1N1pdm09 virus infection.