flu vaccine

After yesterday's announcements by the World Health Organization, calling swine flu "unstoppable" and noting that there might not be enough vaccine produced by the time flu season rolls around, the debate began over what to do with the small amount of H1N1 vaccine that will be produced this year.

A few months AGO, when researchers analyzed the genome of the devastating 1918 influenza, they found it to be a direct descendant of a common bird-flu strain, with just a few disparate amino acids here and there. The finding cast a chilling new light on the most lethal modern bird flu, known as H5N1, which has already killed at least 70 people in Asia but isn't transmissible between humans-yet.