Two stories today coming out of my alma mater, the University of Rochester:

New Type of Flu Vaccine Created

Associate professor of medicine, microbiology and immunology John Treanor has developed an influenza vaccine that, if successful, will be used by doctors everywhere to protect patients from the flu.

"We don't know whether flu shots made this new way can actually prevent against flu," Treanor said. "We know it makes antibodies, but it's not proven to prevent against the flu yet. We are trying to see whether it does."

Every flu season, one in five people are infected with the virus. Hence, to keep from getting sick, many people opt to be injected with a flu vaccine made from a complicated process involving fertilized chicken eggs.

However, the complexity of this procedure often makes it virtually impossible to make enough of the vaccine to adequately protect everyone in need, especially elderly people who can die from the virus.

The current flu vaccine works by fooling the body into making antibodies to fight against the virus. It is made by injecting the flu virus into a fertilized chicken egg until it multiplies.

Since it takes so long to make, it is expensive and also makes it difficult for the virus to grow in the eggs. This year, one major company that produces the vaccine had problems developing it and therefore could not market nearly enough.

Treanor is working to develop a vaccine using molecular biology to synthesize proteins from DNA, similar to the process presently used to make the hepatitis shot. The antibody response is identical, yet it is much faster and more efficient to make.

In order to do this, Treanor is looking for a test group of healthy individuals under the age of 49. He will inject half of the group with the vaccine and another group with a placebo around Thanksgiving.

He will continue to keep in touch with them through the flu season, then compare how often the people only injected with the placebo get the flu versus those injected with the vaccine.

Source: [1] Campus Times

And my former college EMS squad held a mass casualty drill on campus:

[2] MERT learns from drill in ICMC

Rescuers climbed over fallen furniture and blocked doors, relying on flashlights to see their way through dark halls. Screams were coming from all sides. And with the municipal police and fire departments busy, the students of the Medical Emergency Response Team were the only ones that could help.

But luckily, this was only a test.

On Oct. 23, MERT held a drill as both a team-building exercise and to test their ability to handle a multiple casualty incident.

"What we basically did was we simulated a drill of a collapsed building on campus," junior and MERT Director of Operations Josh Brown said.

"We used the [Inter-Campus Music Center]," Brown said. "[Some of] the residents volunteered to be patients."

In the drill, several residents of ICMC and volunteers from MERT simulated having injuries and needing to be rescued.

"We had about ten patients, and each patient, before the drill was started, had injuries, and they were told how the injuries would progress if they weren't treated in time," junior and MERT Assistant Director of Training Alexandra Cornwall said.

The simulated disaster was a major change from their usual work. "It's very chaotic, it's not the normal run-of-the-mill traffic accident," Cornwall said. "It's dark, there are people screaming from all the rooms, [and] furniture was upended."

The disaster they simulated was clearly unlikely. "The situation was that we were pretending it was an earthquake," she said.

Besides the fact that such events are almost impossible in this area, it would not be MERT's problem in the first place. "It's not in our nature to respond to [major disasters] for liability reasons," Cornwall said. However, for the purposes of the exercise they assumed that other emergency response services would be occupied or unable to reach UR.

The value of the drill was not in practicing a procedure for that specific type of event, but for practicing teamwork and coordination. "I think it was useful because it showed us what we would have to do to set up a structure for dealing with situations like this," sophomore and MERT Public Relations Chair Glenn Klucka said.

"We also worked on communication skills between teams," Cornwall said. "It was just an all-around team-building event."

The lessons from the drill are applicable to normal MERT work. Even though a disaster as large as that is very unlikely, incidents requiring the same type of coordination and concentration do occur. "The type of [event] we have to deal with on campus is multiple simultaneous calls," Cornwall said. "I think last year we had like nine calls in two hours."

MERT made it through those busy incidents, but there were worries about their ability to handle them routinely. "We handled it communicating with cell phones, but we weren't sure about getting resources to everyone injured," Cornwall said. "That's the type of [mass casualty incident] we would experience here on campus."

Source: [3] Campus Times