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"3.4 million doses of vaccines will be available," said Dr. Jay Butler, who heads the 2009 H1N1 Vaccine Task Force at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "All of that vaccine is the inhalable vaccine," he said Friday. That form of vaccine is marketed in the United States as FluMist and is approved only for healthy individuals between the ages of 2 and 49. Pregnant women are not allowed to get this type of vaccine because it contains a live virus (if you give this to your 2 year old you should be shot) . Butler added that he thinks there some flu shots may be available in early October as well, but he had a hard number only for the inhalable vaccine. Flu shots contain an "in activated ," or dead, virus. The 3.4 million doses of vaccine that will be shipped at the beginning of October are the first of 195 million doses the U.S. government has purchased from five vaccine manufacturers, Butler said. Last week, the Food and Drug Administration...

- The federal government is reintroducing a powerful weapon in the fight against the H1N1 flu virus: Elmo. The popular Sesame Street character will be featured in a series of public service advertisements meant to encourage better hygiene among young children, the Department of Health and Human Services announced Tuesday. In the ads, Elmo teams up with Gordon, another Sesame Street veteran, to stress the importance of basic healthy habits such as frequent hand washing, sneezing into the bend of your arm, and not touching your mouth, nose, and eyes. The ads were initially rolled out in May, but have now been repackaged to help promote www.flu.gov , the government Web site responsible for posting information regarding the H1N1 virus. "We are thrilled to partner with Elmo, Gordon, and Sesame Workshop again to emphasize the steps kids and their parents can take to stay happy and healthy this school year," Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a st...

After more than a week of SWINE FLU PANIC , the very media outlets that help fuel the PANIC are starting to agree with our original assessment : this whole thing is kind of a farce . For example! Joe Lauria is a WSJ reporter who came down with a bad case of the flu right after the PANIC hit New York. He set out to try to get tested and see if he had the deadly swine flu . Turns out, that's impossible! The city, the state, doctors, and hospitals all passed him off to someone else, with the final outcome being: you can't really get tested for swine flu in NYC, and they don't want to test you, so just forget it. But it's still very, you know, dangerous. So the media finds itself coming to the realization that this whole thing is overblown, but still being forced to cater to the public fears that they created last week. Now newspapers are in the position of simultaneously reporting that the DEADLY SWINE FLU is actually "mild," but officials are still very con...

Follow the herd! WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The World Health Organization prepared to raise the pandemic threat level from swine flu to phase 5 on Wednesday as the virus spread and killed the first person outside Mexico , a toddler in Texas. "Things are moving fast," a WHO? source told Reuters. Nearly a week after the H1N1 virus, or swine flu, first emerged in California and Texas and was found to have caused deaths in Mexico, Spain reported the first case in Europe of swine flu in a person who had not been to Mexico, illustrating the danger of person-to-person transmission. Phase 5 is the WHO's second highest level of warning that a pandemic, or global outbreak of a serious new illness, is imminent. (its over people, end of world) "It is clear that the virus is spreading and we don't see evidence of it slowing down at this point," Dr. Keiji Fukuda, WHO acting assistant director-gener...

- Seventy-three cases of swine flu have been confirmed worldwide, the World Health Organization said Monday. Forty of those cases are in the United States, 26 in Mexico, six in Canada and one in Spain, a WHO representative said. Hundreds more cases are suspected, especially in Mexico, where as many as 103 deaths in Mexico are thought to have been caused by the virus, the country's health minister said. More than 1,700 cases have been reported but not confirmed in the country. Federal officials confirmed 20 new U.S. cases on Monday. A federal official said they were at the same school in New York in which eight U.S. cases were confirmed earlier. More than 100 students at the school were out with flu-like symptoms last week. President Obama said Monday that the swine flu outbreak is a "cause for concern and requires a heightened state of alert," but is not a "cause for alarm." He added that the federal government is closely monitoring emerging cases and had ...