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WHO calls nations to flu vaccine summit

WASHINGTON - The World Health Organization has called an unprecedented summit meeting next week of flu vaccinemakers and nations to expand plans for dealing with the growing threat of a flu pandemic.

Sixteen vaccine companies and health officials from the United States and other large countries already have agreed to attend the summit in Geneva, Switzerland, on Nov. 11, said Klaus Stohr, influenza chief of the United Nations' health agency.

With increasing signs that bird flu is becoming established in Asia, it's only a matter of time until such a virus adapts itself to spread more easily from person to person, he said.

Flu kills about 36,000 people in the United States and a million worldwide each year by conservative estimates, Stohr said. But tens of millions die in a pandemic, which occurs every 20 to 30 years, when a flu strain changes so dramatically that people have little immunity from previous flu bouts.

There were three pandemics in the 20th century; all spread worldwide within a year of being detected.

The worst was the Spanish flu in 1918-19, when as many as 50-million people worldwide were thought to have died, nearly half of them young, healthy adults. More than 500,000 died in the United States.

The 1957-58 Asian flu caused about 70,000 deaths in the United States, followed by the 1968-69 Hong Kong flu, which caused about 34,000 U.S. deaths.

The current vaccine shortage in the United States, caused by loss of one of the country's two major flu shot suppliers, reveals how vulnerable the world is and serves as a "dress rehearsal" for the kind of rationing and emergency measures that would be needed in a pandemic, said Dr. Wendy Keitel of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.

WASHINGTON - A new vaccine against rotavirus, the diarrheal infection that kills millions of children worldwide, doesn't appear to raise the risk of serious bowel blockages that caused a previous vaccine to be pulled from the market five years ago, doctors reported Sunday.

The new vaccine, Rotarix, was recently licensed in Mexico and is expected to go on sale there this year. Its Belgian maker, GlaxoSmithKline Biologicals, plans to seek similar approvals throughout Latin America, Asia and Europe, and to launch a study in the United States aimed at getting it approved for American infants.

Doctors tested the vaccine in more than 63,000 infants in Latin America and Finland and reported results Sunday at an American Society for Microbiology meeting.

Rotavirus hospitalizes tens of thousands of babies and toddlers in the United States and kills several dozen, but is a much more serious problem in poor countries.

CLEVELAND - The Cleveland Clinic says it is the first institution to receive review board approval of human facial transplant for someone severely disfigured by burns or disease.

"We are at this point ready to begin screening patients," said Dr. Maria Siemionow, the director of plastic surgery research and training in microscopic surgery.

A central question in debate over the procedure has been whether patients should be subjected to risks of transplant failure and life-threatening complications from antirejection drugs for an operation that is not lifesaving.

Siemionow said she wants to start with a relatively simple procedure that would involve transplanting only the skin and underlying fat. The patient's own muscles shape the face, so the patient would not take on the appearance of the donor, she said.