Well! I'm feeling much safer now!

WASHINGTON — A new report finds that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did a poor job of screening medical experts for financial conflicts when it hired them to advise the agency on vaccine safety, officials said Thursday.

Most of the experts who served on advisory panels in 2007 to evaluate vaccines for flu and cervical cancer had potential conflicts that were never resolved, the report said. Some were legally barred from considering the issues but did so anyway.

In the report, expected to be released Friday, Daniel R. Levinson, the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, found that the centers failed nearly every time to ensure that the experts adequately filled out forms confirming they were not being paid by companies with an interest in their decisions.

The report found that 64 percent of the advisers had potential conflicts of interest that were never identified or were left unresolved by the centers. Thirteen percent failed to have an appropriate conflicts form on file at the agency at all, which should have barred their participation in the meetings entirely, Mr. Levinson found. And 3 percent voted on matters that ethics officers had already barred them from considering.

Boy, that's a pretty big jump. The new numbers include deaths indirectly caused by flu complications like pneumonia:

Swine flu has killed nearly 4,000 people in the US, including 540 children, officials said after devising a new counting method.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said the new system is based on more precise figures provided by 10 states.

The previous estimated death toll from the H1N1 virus in the US was 672.

Latest figures show about 22 million Americans contracted the virus in six months with some 98,000 hospitalised.

"This is just the first six months and I am expecting all of these numbers, unfortunately, to continue to rise," said Dr Anne Schuchat of the CDC.

She said that, although still imprecise, the new statistics provide "a bigger picture of what has been going on in the first six months of the pandemic".

The CDC now estimates that 3,900 people in the US have died from the virus in the past six months.

Dr Schuchat said that in children under 18, an estimated eight million have had swine flu, with 36,000 hospitalised and 540 deaths.

The new estimated death toll for children is four times higher than the previous estimate.

"We will be updating the toll that the pandemic has taken... about every three to four weeks," she said.

We're not even in flu season yet, and already hospitals are overloaded. I have to wonder how many cities are ready for this:

BALTIMORE — To Mitchell Goldstein, the flood of sick children seemed endless. Day after day, nearly three times as many kids as usual streamed into the rainbow-colored pediatric emergency room at Johns Hopkins Hospital, sniffling and feverish, worried parents hovering.

The press of children with swine flu was so relentless that doctors opened an annex in a hospital dining room to handle the overflow. "Our worst day" was Sunday, Oct. 11, says Goldstein, one of the ER doctors. "We had 15 to 20 patients an hour. It was 24/7. There wasn't a lull."

Last week, the epidemic of ailing children let up somewhat. But doctors here are expecting a new run of flu patients — the children's parents. "What we see first in (children) we see two to three weeks later in adults," says Trish Perl, the hospital's director of infection control.

The scenes at Johns Hopkins are being repeated at hospitals in Denver and Duluth, Seattle and San Diego, as waves of flu patients arrive at their doors, doubling their emergency room volume. Just as significant is the effect on intensive care units: A relatively small number of flu patients are requiring intensive care, but some are so ill they will need round-the-clock care for weeks.

Doctors at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere expect the number of patients needing hospitalization and intensive care to rise. Such an influx of intensive care patients eventually could force some hospitals to cancel services such as elective surgery, they say.

"Why did President Obama declare a national emergency? Because what's going on at Hopkins is happening across the country," Perl says. "An infection that generally doesn't appear to be severe is pushing hospitals to their limit."

The White House declaration, announced Saturday, was designed to give hospitals the flexibility to move patients to satellite facilities if they are overwhelmed in dealing with an outbreak that is now widespread in 46 states and afflicting millions of people, says Reid Cherlin, an administration spokesman.

"H1N1 is moving rapidly, as expected," Cherlin says. "By the time regions or health care systems recognize they are becoming overburdened, they need to implement disaster plans quickly."

[...] To many analysts, swine flu appears to be two overlapping epidemics: one a cascade of mild to moderate cases that is stressing hospital emergency rooms, and the second a narrow stream of unusually young patients who need intensive care.

[...] Connie Price, chief of infectious diseases at Denver Health, the city's public hospital, says, "I've been living this" since Aug. 28, when the hospital's lab reported 12 positive tests for swine flu.

"Since then we've been inundated," she says. "In a typical flu season, we may hospitalize 15 patients. With H1N1, we've hospitalized 10 times that many. We're not even in flu season yet."

President Obama has declared the swine flu outbreak a national emergency. But if you're still waiting to get the swine flu vaccine, looks like you're going to have to wait a bit longer:

Less than half of the swine-flu vaccine expected to be shipped to doctors, hospitals and clinics in the U.S. this month has been shipped so far. The disease now is widespread in 46 states and the U.S. death toll has passed 1,000.

The delays are occurring around the globe, officials said, and are due to a series of manufacturing difficulties, as vaccine makers scramble to fill vast orders using an old technology that requires growing virus in chicken eggs.

It takes about six to nine months to produce vaccine once a flu strain has been identified.

A total of 11.3 million doses of vaccine had been shipped to U.S. doctors, hospitals, and clinics as of Wednesday, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, out of a total of 14.1 million doses that manufacturers had shipped to warehouses by that time.

By Friday, 16.1 million doses of vaccine for what is also called H1N1 flu had been shipped to warehouses, the CDC said.

The total is far below the government's most recent estimate that by the end of this month, about 28 million to 30 million doses would be ready.

That estimate itself is a revision, made last week, from a prior expectation of about 40 million doses by the end of the month. However, the number of doses shipped is steadily increasing.

If this mutates into a more virulent flu, we're in trouble - because we just don't have enough ventilators to treat a major pandemic:

A new government study shows that one quarter of Americans who were sick enough to be hospitalized with swine flu last spring wound up needing intensive care, and 7% of them died.

Health experts say that is a little higher than with ordinary seasonal flu. They say the biggest difference is that nearly half of those hospitalized with the new swine flu have been children and teens. Flu usually strikes hardest in the elderly.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did the study, with local and state health departments. Results were published online Thursday by the New England Journal of Medicine.

Researchers identified 272 patients hospitalized for at least a day from April through mid-June, when the novel virus caused its first wave of cases. That's about one-fourth of the total hospitalizations for swine flu reported during that time, but researchers only studied lab-confirmed cases and patients who agreed to be part of the study.

Three-fourths of these patients had other health problems, such as diabetes — typical of seasonal flu, too. However, only 5% were 65 and older; ordinary seasonal flu usually hits hardest in the elderly.

We're already seeing problems in other countries:

Oct. 9 (Bloomberg) -- Swine flu drove a 15-fold increase in intensive care admissions for viral lung inflammation in Australia and New Zealand, especially among pregnant women, the obese and people with chronic lung disease, a study found.

During the peak of severe illness, patients with the new H1N1 influenza strain filled 8.9 percent to 19 percent of all intensive-care hospital beds in each state of Australia and New Zealand, according to the study published yesterday in the New England Journal of Medicine. Almost 65 percent of intensive-care H1N1 patients required mechanical ventilation.

The Southern Hemisphere’s winter flu season, studied from June 1 to Aug. 31, may give health officials in the Northern Hemisphere an indication of what to expect in coming months, the researchers said yesterday. The pandemic filled all available beds in some units and prompted doctors to postpone nonessential surgery, New Zealand’s health ministry said in July.

CNN's conservative pundit named Alex Castellanos tried his best to undermine Alan Grayson's charge that republicans have a non existent health care plan which is hurting America. He's as slimy as they get since he's an old ad man and he made me cringe when he said this to Rep. Alan Grayson.

Castellanos: I'm a republican congressman and I have a question. Which particular Americans do you think I'd like to die? Can you name some?

Well I have a name for you..

Kimberly Young

Friends say the Miami University graduate who died this week after reportedly suffering from swine flu delayed getting medical treatment because she did not have health insurance.

News of Kimberly Young’s death Wednesday, Sept. 23, came as a shock to those who knew the vibrant 22-year-old who was working at least two jobs in Oxford after graduating with a double major in December 2008.

Young became ill about two weeks ago, but didn’t seek care initially because she didn’t have health insurance and was worried about the cost, according to Brent Mowery, her friend and former roommate.

Mowery said Young eventually went to an urgent care facility in Hamilton where she was given pain medication and then sent home.

On Tuesday, Sept. 22, Young’s condition suddenly worsened and her roommate drove her to McCullough Hyde Memorial Hospital in Oxford, where she was flown in critical condition to University Hospital in Cincinnati.

There are thousands more just like Kimberly. Castellanos should be ashamed to even go there, but he's a conservative pundit and he can say anything.

I think the blogosphere appreciates a liberal with guts. Alan Grayson needs our support so he can keep fighting for the Kimberly's of America.

This is startling news. Until we know if there's a connection, pregnant women should be very careful. Talk to your doctor about whether you should have Tamiflu in reserve:

THURSDAY, Oct. 1 (HealthDay News) -- Twenty-eight pregnant women in the United States had died from H1N1 swine flu as of the end of August, and 100 pregnant women had been hospitalized in intensive care, federal health officials said Thursday.

While the officials said they've never tracked deaths of pregnant women from seasonal flu, the number of deaths from the H1N1 flu could be significant.

"These are really upsetting numbers," Dr. Anne Schuchat, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said during an afternoon press conference.

"We have obstetricians here at CDC who are coordinating the outreach as well as the surveillance efforts around it," she said. "And they're talking to doctors around the country who have never seen this kind of thing before. We don't track seasonal flu. We haven't in the past tracked seasonal flu complications in pregnancy. But what we are seeing is quite striking."

Schuchat said it's not yet clear whether there is something different about the H1N1 flu's effect on pregnant women, or whether researchers are noticing its effect on pregnant women more because the virus is being monitored closely.

"But I think the obstetric caregivers here and the ones that we're speaking with have rarely seen this kind of thing in practice," she said.

Schuchat urged pregnant women to get both the seasonal flu vaccine and the H1N1 swine flu vaccine, which will be available starting next week. Seasonal flu vaccines are already available.

"We encourage caregivers to vaccinate pregnant women or refer them to a place where they can be vaccinated," she said.

She also stressed that women, doctors and nurse midwives should remember that "antiviral medicine [such as Tamiflu] can be a very important treatment for pregnant women who have respiratory illness and influenza-like symptoms."

Zaius Nation: Zaius sings a time-honored tribute to Max Baucus.

Sunshine Empire: It's about payback.

Just an Earthbound Misfit: No, our children is not learning.

Fried Green Al-Qaedas: Horton Catches the Flu

And finally, Max Baucus, if that song by Zaius touched a nerve, you might take a lesson from Dirk Benedict.

Mike returns tomorrow; send tips to finnsagain AT aol DOT com

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(h/t David)

From This Week with George Stephanopolous, some good news for those of us who want to be vaccinated. Remember, you minimize your risk of side effects by getting it a few weeks apart from your regular flu shot. I got my flu shot this week, I'm getting the pneumonia vaccine in two weeks and the swine flu shot two weeks after that:

Amid concerns that H1N1 swine flu vaccine will come too late this flu season, Health and Human Services Secretary told me this morning on ‘This Week’ that the vaccine will be available by the first week of October, 2 weeks earlier than previously expected.

“We are on track to have an ample supply rolling out by mid October, but we may have some early vaccine as early as the first full week in October. And we plan to get the vaccine rolling out the door as fast as it hits the production line.”

This week, DHHS released new research showing that one dose of the H1N1 vaccine will be enough to protect people from the virus rather than multiple doses.

“The earlier doses are probably going to be targeted to health care workers and other high priority groups, but the one dose means that people will be able to have a robust response in about 10 days of getting that first shot and that’s incredibly helpful,” Sebelius said.

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Sure, like Duncan says, Glenn Beck is a WATB. We knew that the first time he cried on-air for us.

He's also an evasive guy when confronted with his falsehoods. We saw that yesterday on The View. Whoopie Goldberg's epithet for Beck -- A Lying Sack of Dog Mess -- is a name that's going to stick, like something on the bottom of his shoe.

In fact, we now have a new acronym for him: the LSDM. We don't need to use his actual name anymore.

Oh, yeah, besides being a WATB -- check out his website's report in which he claims he was "ambushed" -- he's also seriously FOS. As when he called in sick for his own show that same afternoon, leaving us to the tender mercies of Judge Napolitano and Michelle Malkin.

Then, at the very end, he called in all plugged-up sounding and claimed he had "a case of the 24-hour swine flu". And then proceeded to once again prevaricate about the "ridiculous" interview we had all just watched that morning.

Beck: Apparently I was a liar because I said that -- which is true -- uh, that she -- I, I, Barbara Walters said hello to me, instead, it was I said hello to Barbara Walters. I walked up to her -- I guess that's we need to spend our time on for seven minutes.

In Beck's truncated version of what transpired at The View, the only reason to call him a liar was that he and Walters had different views on who said hello first. But that's BS On A Stick.

Roll the tape: You'll quickly note that the greeting disagreement started things off, but the main reason they called him a liar was that his whole story on the radio was a narrative about how you can't reserve a seat on an Amtrak train, and here these two media elites came and got reserved seats! The audacity!

But as both Walters and Goldberg explained to the LSDM, they hadn't gotten reserved seats at all. They had worked their ways back to that car after finding no seats in the front cars.

The LSDM, as is his wont, was just making stuff up. No wonder he kinda accidentally omitted that from his lamestain excuse -- it would have made it just that much lamer.

In any event, we remain indebted to Whoopie Goldberg for her masterful contribution to the Wingnut Lexicon.