Word: virus
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...more recent study, published in Cancer Prevention Research, investigators sought to explain another race-based disparity, that whites survive certain head and neck cancers more often than blacks. There was a biological mechanism at play, the authors found: the presence of the sexually transmitted human papilloma virus (HPV), which appeared to protect patients with oropharyngeal cancer. HPV-positive patients had a five times higher rate of cancer survival than HPV-negative patients; as it turned out, whites had a nine times higher rate of HPV infection than blacks, which the researchers believed largely explained the difference in survival...
...usually an afterthought for most people. Despite the easy availability of the shots, fewer than 40% of Americans get them in any one year - never mind that flu kills some 36,000 of us annually. But this flu season is likely to be different. Thanks to the new H1N1/09 virus, to which almost none of us are immune, flu anxiety is high - and demand for the new vaccine should be too. Washington is now gearing up to respond, hoping to inoculate millions of Americans and blunt the severity of the first pandemic in four decades...
...that in this case, the usual practice might not be the best. Rather than inoculating the people likeliest to die from H1N1/09, we may want instead to inoculate the people likeliest to spread it. After all, even the most at-risk among us can't get sick with a virus we never come in contact with. "If you can stop transmission, you can protect the people who are vulnerable," says Jan Medlock, a mathematician at Clemson University and one of the authors of the Science paper...
...first for inoculating children ages 5 to 19 and adults ages 30 to 39. That's because school-age children are such a powerful nexus of flu infection: they get sick, infect one another in the close and less-than-hygienic hothouse of school and then bring the virus back home to their parents. The parents, in turn, can then infect others in the community. Knock these links out of the transmission chain, and the spread of the virus slows down considerably - an assertion backed up by studies from Japan, where vaccinations of young children against regular seasonal flu reduced...
...variation on what's called herd immunity - the idea that even if you can't vaccinate an entire population, you can achieve nearly complete disease control by vaccinating at least the overwhelming portion of it. That's because every inoculated person serves as a sort of firebreak against the virus; surround the disease with enough people who are immune to its spread, and it simply winks out, never reaching the few people who still aren't immune. The Science study offers a chance to get a kind of herd immunity on the cheap by inoculating the super-spreaders first...