Saturday, October 16, 2004
Flu vaccine update: Here is the situation: Last week, British regulators suspended Chiron's license for the vaccine plant, throwing half the expected U.S. influenza vaccine supply into doubt. Chiron found and reported contamination with a bacteria called Serratia, but had hoped to correct the problem in time to save most of the vaccine production.
But [acting U.S. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner] Crawford said whatever went wrong apparently affected everything Chiron made at the plant, which the California-based company acquired when it bought a British company called PowderJect.
"The system was such that a small number of the lots were in fact contaminated. As we tried to assure ourselves that this was isolated to those few lots, we were not able to do so," Crawford said. What is Serratia? Here's the poop: Members of the Serratia genus were once known as harmless organisms that produced a characteristic red pigment. Today, Serratia marcescens is considered a harmful human pathogen which has been known to cause urinary tract infections, wound infections, and pneumonia. Serratia bacteria also have many antibiotic resistance properties which may become important if the incidence of Serratia infections dramatically increases. Yikes!
posted by Quiddity at 10/16/2004 01:40:00 PM
2 comments
Here is a footnote about Serratia. Perhaps the virulence of Serratia has something to do with the endeavors of mankind
http://www.rense.com/politics5/hist.htm
One of the biggest experiments involved the use of Serratia marcescens being sprayed over San Francisco. This organism is especially nice because it produces a red/pink pigment when grown on certain media, which makes identification very easy. At one point, 5000 particles/minute were sprayed from the coastal areas inward. During this time, 1 man died (in the hospital) and 10 others became infected in what was described as "a mystery to doctors." Although the military never did many follow up studies on these tests, one results was that it showed nearly every single person became infected with the test organism. In hindsight, now that some of this information has become declassified, it's been shown that during periods following spraying tests, there were 5-10 times the normal infections reported.
In the debate, Bush tried to make it sound as if his administration intervened to stop a British company from sending bad drugs here.
Liar.
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