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Mortality benefits of influenza vaccination in elderly people: an ongoing controversy
Original Text
Dr Lone Simonsen PhD a c Corresponding AuthorEmail Address, Robert J Taylor PhD d, Cecile Viboud PhD b, Mark A Miller MD b, Lisa A Jackson MD e
Summary
Influenza vaccination policy in most high-income countries attempts to reduce the mortality burden of influenza by targeting people aged at least 65 years for vaccination. However, the effectiveness of this strategy is under debate. Although placebo-controlled randomised trials show influenza vaccine is effective in younger adults, few trials have included elderly people, and especially those aged at least 70 years, the age-group that accounts for three-quarters of all influenza-related deaths. Recent excess mortality studies were unable to confirm a decline in influenza-related mortality since 1980, even as vaccination coverage increased from 15% to 65%. Paradoxically, whereas those studies attribute about 5% of all winter deaths to influenza, many cohort studies report a 50% reduction in the total risk of death in winter—a benefit ten times greater than the estimated influenza mortality burden. New studies, however, have shown substantial unadjusted selection bias in previous cohort studies. We propose an analytical framework for detecting such residual bias. We conclude that frailty selection bias and use of non-specific endpoints such as all-cause mortality have led cohort studies to greatly exaggerate vaccine benefits. The remaining evidence base is currently insufficient to indicate the magnitude of the mortality benefit, if any, that elderly people derive from the vaccination programme.
In 1982, he developed the flu monoclonal antibody, which is widely used throughout the pharmaceutical, biotech, and research industries in epitope tagging techniques. He also produced a broad panel of monoclonal antibodies against synthetic peptides of oncogenes and growth factors. These monoclonal antibodies were distributed worldwide to researchers by the National Cancer Institute. The antibodies identified novel related proteins which correlated with clinical parameters.
This technology was used to form ProgenX, a cancer diagnostic company that became Ligand Pharmaceuticals. Dr Niman subsequently identified protein expression patterns at the University of Pittsburgh. More recently, he became interested in infectious diseases while at Harvard Medical School. He then founded Recombinomics and discovered how viruses rapidly evolve. These latest findings are the subject of recent patent filings.
Originally posted by ecoparity
Where are you getting "Bird Flu" from? Dr Niman said that the SWINE Flu pandemic, the one we are currently in, should have been called L6 earlier, an opinion that was widely shared at that time and turned out to be correct.
On 6 April, writing of Thai Binh Haiphong and Quang Ninh H5N1 Clusters, Niman concluded "The flu pandemic of 2005 has clearly begun." - This helped prompt a thread on the Agonist (the Nimanist?), starting in July with posters wondering when the world's media would take notice of H5N1 in humans; the concensus was during August; one forecast the US would be knee-deep in bodies by mid-October. (See separate thread in this forum, on Chicken Little Flu)