Articles: pandemics.
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Antigen-specific antibodies are well characterized after vaccination with pandemic H1N1 or seasonal influenza vaccines. However, knowledge on cellular immunity toward pandemic H1N1 after vaccination and infection and cross-reactivities toward seasonal antigens is limited. Nineteen individuals were vaccinated with the pandemic H1N1 vaccine. ⋯ Influenza-specific T cells in vaccinees had a Th1 phenotype mainly coexpressing IFN-γ and IL-2, whereas patients with active pandemic influenza showed a shift toward cells predominantly expressing IFN-γ. In conclusion, T cells toward seasonal influenza antigens cross-react with pandemic H1N1 antigens and affect induction of specific T cells after pandemic influenza vaccination. In addition, the cytokine patterns of specific T cells during acute H1N1 infection and after vaccination differ, and the predominantly dual-positive cytokine profile of vaccine-induced T cells suggests sufficient functionality to confer successful virus control.
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Responses to the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, and criticisms of those responses, were framed by issues endemic to the meeting of 'health' and 'security' as governing domains. Offering an editorial introduction to the selection of papers in this special issue, it is suggested that existing scholarship in the emerging field of 'health security' can be categorized according to realist-advocacy, historical-analytic, problematization and critical-inequality approaches. In contributing to this literature through an event-based focus on the pandemic, the papers embrace the opportunity to examine health security architectures acting and interacting 'in the event', to not only speculate over the possible implications of this governing trope, but to review them. Questions of the scales of governance and associated forms of expertise, the implications of differing modes of governance (from preparedness to surveillance to forms of intervention), and the role of health inequalities in the patterning of the pandemic are identified as key themes running across the papers.
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Although the term biosurveillance is employed with increasing frequency there remain variances in way in which the concept is both understood and practiced in the US and the UK, respectively. In this paper I begin by exploring the different epistemological and geographical approaches to biosurveillance that are employed in each locality, paying particular attention to the scales at which they, respectively, operate. ⋯ I contend in this paper, and illustrate through a study of the techniques of surveillance employed during the recent H1N1 (swine flu) pandemic, that these different 'registers' of biosurveillance are now being bought into the same frame of reference to create new, ever more robust and finely calibrated systems of biological surveillance. In thinking through the political implications of the emergent collision, I outline here, employing work from Cooper, Katz, and Lyon how biosurveillance is becoming progressively domesticated and reflect on the potential this has for creating new, expansive, and very pervasive, forms of biological 'governmentality'.
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The objectives were to estimate 2009 pandemic influenza A (pH1N1) vaccination coverage among pregnant women and identify associated factors. ⋯ Among pregnant women in King County, pH1N1 vaccination coverage was high. To improve coverage during nonpandemic seasons, influenza vaccine should be recommended routinely by prenatal care providers and vaccination provided where prenatal care is received. Barriers to midwives providing vaccination recommendations to patients should be explored.