Madison and the University of Wisconsin are continuing their push to vaccinate students and a targeted group of community members against the swine flu by offering new H1N1 vaccine clinics in the next few weeks. Public Health-Madison and Dane County will be offering H1N1 clinics at six locations in Madison. The vaccines will be given to pregnant women, people who live with or care for infants less than six months old.

The FDA has approved injectible vaccine and a nasal spray vaccine for the 2009 H1N1. In fact, the results have been better than good. Four manufacturers, CSL Ltd, MedImmune LLC, Novartis Vaccines and Diagnostics Ltd and Sanofi Pasteur Inc, have been given the go-ahead to manufacture them. A study carried in Australia and another one by the US National Institutes of Health indicated that healthy adults got protection from the flu with just one dose of vaccine, instead of two doses. People showed “robust” protection against the virus after about eight to 10 days of getting the vaccine shot, according to the FDA. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expects about 45 million doses to be available by mid-October.

Daiichi Sankyo Co’s new influenza drug CS-8958 has been successful in the late stage clinical studies. The company is planning to filing for government approval in Japan by March. The new drug has demonstrated better efficacy and safety in its phase-3 studies as compared with Roche’s Tamiflu, one of the most widely prescribed influenza drugs. CS-8958 also produced better results than Tamiflu in pediatric studies without any serious safety problems, Daiichi Sankyo said. Daiichi Sankyo expects CS-8958 to be also effective for treating swine flu.