After a brief debate, the Senate voted 30-1, with Sen. Leticia Van de Putte, D-San Antonio, casting the lone "no" vote.

The bill would prevent the HPV vaccine from being required for school enrollment until 2011. The version passed by the House has no expiration date.

At the 2007 Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research, presentations on ongoing HPV trials and other new approaches to stimulating the immune system are injecting momentum into cancer vaccine research.

Proponents of the vaccine say it will be most effective when given before girls become sexually active. Ministry officials said the vaccine is being supplied by Sanofi-Pasteur, the vaccine division of Sanofi-Aventis.

February 22, 2007 - Yesterday, Merck announced that it is no longer going to try to persuade states to make its new $360 cervical cancer vaccine mandatory for all pre-teens. (At least, not publicly). The company wouldn’t divulge how much it has spent, to date, on its lobbying campaign.

Virtually everyone has heard about “Gardasil.” Planned Parenthood backs it. Women in Government extols its virtues. (Both organizations receive significant contributions from Merck). Not long ago, a glowing New York Times editorial congratulated Texas governor Rick Perry for mandating “A Vaccine To  Save Women’s Lives.”( So far as I know, Merck makes no contributions to The New York Times, but Perry’s former chief of staff is a Merck lobbyist.) At this point, twenty states have drafted plans to follow Perry’s example.

Katie Stephen, 16, fell ill with a fever 10 days after being injected with an early form of the immunisation as a toddler in 1991.

Parents Wendy and Alistair believe the vaccine, which included a strain of mumps, was responsible for their daughter losing the hearing in her left ear.

Children given a flu vaccine by nasal spray were better protected against the disease than those given the old shot in the arm, according to new research in the most recent New England Journal of Medicine.

The study, which followed nearly 8,500 children in 16 countries, found the vaccine sniffed up the nose reduced the influenza "attack rate" in children by 55 percent compared to the traditional injections.

The attack rate is the number of people who get sick compared to the total number of people in a study group.

"Children get the flu twice as often as adults," said Dr. Robert Belshe of St. Louis University, the study's lead author. "It's important to vaccinate kids against influenza -- and to identify new and more effective flu vaccine options -- because kids have a higher attack rate for influenza infection than adults."

A new powdered form of BCG, the tuberculosis vaccine, mixes a mycobacterium [green] with leucine [gray] and may pave the way for more powerful, needle-free forms of the vaccine.

A new powdered form of tuberculosis (TB) vaccine may help save some of the nearly two million lives lost to the disease annually. In preliminary tests, the powdered form contained more active bacterial cells than a freeze-dried version similar to the existing vaccine. The result may pave the way for health workers to administer the vaccine as an aerosol to the lungs instead of as an injection, possibly leading to a more effective treatment.

In recent news, however, the adequacy of the warning label provided by the Center for Disease Control has been tested by the public, as numerous complaints of side effects have surfaced after patients received their HPV vaccinations.

As of now, a report has stated that over 500 people have complained of post-vaccination side effects such as fainting and dizziness, and there have been three recorded cases of the Guillain-Barré syndrome. According to health professionals, the syndrome is a rare disorder within the nervous system that sometimes causes complete paralysis.

Hepatitis E is a liver disease caused by the hepatitis E virus, which spreads through contaminated food or water.

Hepatitis E is rare in the U.S., but it's a major public health problem in developing countries. The disease is most dangerous for pregnant women, who can die or have miscarriages or stillbirths due to hepatitis E.

In the second treatment year, Grazax reduces hay fever symptoms by 44 pct and reduces the need for symptom-relieving medication by 73 pct compared with placebo, ALK Abello said.

ALK Abello said it has recently entered strategic alliances for the Grazax programme with the Menarini Group for some European markets and with Schering-Plough (nyse: SGP - news - people ) for North America..

Copyright AFX News

"To make people understand the importance of polio immunisation in an Islamic context is extremely important. We are engaging moderate religious leaders, community leaders and influential tribal elders. And we are holding community jirgas [councils] to address the concerns of the parents and ensure their children are vaccinated," said Melissa Corkum, a spokesperson for the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.

The message is "that the polio vaccine is safe and that the same vaccine has been used to eradicate polio in other Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia and Indonesia", Corkum said. 

Dr. Vafa Shahabi, Advaxis' Director of Research and Development, reports that because the human immune system is not designed to fight cancer on its own, she and her colleagues are trying to harness its power through a new kind of life form: specifically a family of vaccines, which they call Lovaxin. The vaccines are comprised of new strains of bacteria created in Advaxis' laboratory that are programmed to kill off specific cancers.

Central to this startling discovery is the microbe Listeria monocytogenes, a common bacterium found in milk, cheese and other dairy products. This microorganism apparently aids in fighting cancer by activating the body's own killer (cytotoxic T) cells to elicit a stronger than normal immune response to the presence of cancer cells. The vaccines "teach" the immune system to mount a specialized, targeted response that is lethal to cancer.

A naturally occurring event in infants, intussusception is estimated to occur in the U.S. in approximately 1 in 2,000 infants during the first year of life. Cases of intussusception can occur when no vaccine has been given and the cause is usually unknown. Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reported that since the licensure of ROTATEQ on Feb. 3, 2006 until Jan. 31, 2007, 28 cases of intussusception in infants who received ROTATEQ have been reported in the U.S. to VAERS and that this number does not exceed the number of cases expected based on the background rate. The FDA Public Health Notification on this label change is available at http://www.fda.gov/cber/safety/phnrota021307.htm.