I mentioned I had a full schedule last week that, among other things, wouldn't permit me to watch the ACIP meetings live. What was not on my schedule was an acute illness, now well on the mend but leaving me both very fatigued and even further behind on my other duties than planned. From my brief scan of the ACIP presentation slides and the buzz in the news and medical communities, I'm sure if I had watched it live I'd have been in intensive care by now.
I'll eventually watch the sessions recordings, which aren't yet posted as of Sunday morning. Before my illness I had planned to discuss other issues this week, but instead I'll just mention those items briefly and provide you with links if you want to explore further.
CDC Weighs in on Ebola in the DRC
Last Thursday CDC sent out an official warning about Ebola on its Health Alert Network. Nothing significant to add to when I posted about the outbreak on September 7 - we can expect to learn about more cases for a while, then hope to see things come under control.
New FDA VRBPAC Meeting October 9
This was just announced, but unlikely to be too controversial. The agenda contains only 2 items: recommendations for flu vaccine strain composition for the 2026 southern hemisphere flu season and a discussion of an allergen standardization program.
Johns Hopkins County-Level Measles Surveillance
I had been looking at this site recently and mentioned it in a recent post. JHU has put together something similar to their covid dashboard they provided during the pandemic; that site was really useful and widely used by both scientific groups and lay press. As we have seen all too clearly this year, it only takes pockets of unimmunized people to set off a large measles outbreak. State-wide immunization levels don't really tell us much about this. County-level data should be about the largest sample size we look at to understand measles outbreak risks.
The JHU team provided more details about its platform in a new article last week. I'll be keeping an eye on this dashboard. Here's the past 2 weeks numbers, almost all represent local transmission.
FAERS
Not a typo. You know about VAERS where anyone can report an adverse event they think was related to a vaccination. It has long been misused by anti-vaccine groups who either don't understand the system or just want to use it to manipulate vaccine fear.
FAERS is the FDA Adverse Events Reporting System, sort of the equivalent of VAERS but for drugs. Now one of my go-to journal watch systems, Retraction Watch, sounds an alarm about misuse of FAERS primarily to funnel into paper mills. Be wary of any publication using FAERS data. This figure from a preprint article shows the potential scope.
Better Luck Next Week
Sorry for the brevity of today's post, I hope to be back full strength next week!