'tbrWednesday October 20, 2004 news@michigandaily.com Jbe }1iclthdgan & Ug SCIENCE 5A . . . .. ..... ......... ...... .. .. . Under the influenza UHS handles repercussions of flu vaccine shortage By Kingson Man For the Daily In response to the nationwide flu vaccine shortage, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is working with vaccine manufac- turers to redistribute doses from the less to the more needy, while various local, state and national health care providers are responding in their own ways. On campus, Robert Winfield, director of the University Health Service, said the Uni- versity has between 3,500 and 4,500 doses of flu vaccine to give to students. These were all obtained from France-based Aventis-Pasteur, the only major vaccine supplier to the United States this year. The University also donated 300 doses to Eastern Michigan University, which is expe- riencing a severe shortage because it placed its vaccine order with Chiron, the phar- maceutical company whose vaccines were removed from the market over contamination concerns. Because Chiron, formerly one of the two sup- pliers of flu vaccine, failed its safety inspection, only half the U.S. supply of 100 million vac- cines will be distributed around the country. In addition to the University's stock of vac- cine, UHS decided yesterday to increase its reserve of antiviral medications sixfold, Win- field said. Antiviral medications are used to reduce the symptoms and duration of a flu infection. Based on figures from previous years, the combination of both vaccines and antivirals is "always enough to meet the needs," Winfield said. With just 55 million doses of vaccine on hand, the CDC established a set of recommen- dations for vaccinating only high-risk individu- als, including infants, seniors, pregnant women and health care workers and caregivers. While 100 million Americans still fall under these stricter guidelines, historically only half of those identified as high-risk individuals get vaccinated, CDC Director Julie Gerberding said in a written release. With the media atten- tion that the vaccine shortage has been getting, however, some speculate that this year's per- centage may be much higher. Michigan, along with New Mexico, Califor- nia, and Oregon, has taken measures of its own to preserve vaccines. According to the Michi- gan Department of Community Health direc- tor Janet Olszewski, an emergency order issued by the state's health department would sanction health care providers for providing a flu shot to those not considered a priority. The misde- meanor charge would be punishable by a $200 fine and up to six months in jail. Acknowledging the state's emergency order, Winfield said he would comply with the CDC guidelines. Fliers circulated by UHS in its offic- es contain vaccination information on one side and an appeal for healthy individuals to forego vaccinations on the other. Winfield urged stu- dents to skip vaccinations this year and instead practice good hygiene. This focus on the basics has been reiterated by the UHS "Cover Your Cough" campaign. For those who are at high-risk, vaccinations are currently available for $18 at UHS every Wednesday. After Nov. 3, they will be offered Monday through Friday. In FluMist vaccine, researcher finds alternative to injection By Kingson Man For the Daily The nationwide flu vaccine shortage has drawn attention to how these vaccines are produced, with University researchers leading the way in testing new vaccine options. An alternative to the delivery of flu vaccines through shots is the FluMist vaccine, developed by Hunein Maassab, epidemiology professor at the School of Public Health. The vaccine, which is inhaled through the nose, uses a weakened live version of the influenza virus, unlike the injected vaccine, which uses a dead version. FluMist "stops the virus where it enters the body, generally (through) the nose," Maassab said. A current study led by Public Health Prof. Arnold Monto compares the effectiveness of the inhaled Flu- Mist vaccines against the injected forms. The study, called Flu-vacs, will involve 2,000 people in the Ann Arbor, Livonia and Mount Pleasant communities, but it is not expected to be completed for about three years. The FluMist technology has been licensed to be manufactured by MedImmune for more than a decade, Five doses of Fli with the University receiving a 1.5 tive to the inject percent royalty on its sales. From millions of fertilized chicken eggs. According to a company statement, the vaccine manufacturer Chi- ron failed a safety inspection because of contami- nations in the process, leading to its vaccines being removed from the market. Unlike other "one-time" vaccinations, a yearly shot is necessary to stay immune to the flu. This is because the influenza virus mutates each year into a different form that can overwhelm the human body's immune system. The vaccines that protect against these viruses are then altered each year to stay effective. The vaccine itself is a culmina- tion of a long process of front-line investigation, scientific analysis and a fair amount of guesswork, all of which happens nearly a year before the actual start of each flu season. Efforts to improve the manufac- turing process of vaccines include -' trying to replace the eggs with mammalian cell cultures to incu- bate the viruses. The engineering of hardier vac- cines may eliminate the need for vaccines to be refrigerated at every step of the manufacturing and transporting process. The World Health Organization MiSchool of Pubc Health tracks the yearly rise and spread of ble flu vaccine. new strains of the flu, which often originate in East Asia. Health care providers pass along information on localized out- breaks of new strains of flu, while keeping close watch for especially lethal or easily transmitted strains. One such strain, a form of bird flu, is espe- cially deadly and of concern to scientists. The virus, which made the leap from birds to humans, was responsible for the slaughter of all live chickens in Hong Kong in 1997. It has also been identified this year in Vietnam, according to a report in the New England Journal of Medicine. A panel convened by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration votes on which strains will be included in the final vaccine after assessing the risks, lethality and contagiousness of each virus. The resulting trivalent vaccine confers broad protection against the three strains of influenza that stand the greatest chance of affecting Americans. the juI ta this arrangement, the University reaped $250,000 in royalties last year when FluMist was introduced. Although the introduction of FluMist was consid- ered a failure because of the surplus that was eventu- ally disposed of, MedImmune's profile has been raised by the current vaccine shortage. In a turnaround that will undoubtedly benefit the University, MedImmune is slated to double the production of FluMist to two million doses to help meet the unexpected national demand. Half of the U.S. supply of 100 million vaccines was lost this year due to a manufacturing defect by one of the major U.S. suppliers, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Julie Gerberding said in a news release. Things went amiss this year in the manufacturing process, which relies on incubating the viruses in University Health Service staff member Grace Bell holds one dose of the flu vaccine received from pharmaceutical company Aventis-Pasteur. Chiron, the only other producer of the vaccine, had its entire supply of vaccine removed from the market because of safety and contamination concerns. aturn Leap Quant a Isolating single atoms is first step to building 'revolutionizing' quantum computer Three cadmium ions fluoresce under laser light. By Nalla Moreira Daily Staff Reporter In a windowless basement laboratory glowing with green lasers, physics Prof. Chris Monroe is taking the first steps toward cracking every code that protects data on the Internet. His research on quantum behavior of atoms may help make possible the first quantum computer, a technol- ogy that would theoretically be able to quickly decrypt schemes that encode information from credit card num- bers to national security matters. Most encryption today relies on the fact that factoring a number - or figuring out which prime numbers can be multiplied to get that number - is extremely dif- ficult. For instance, although it's easy to get the number 15 by multiplying 5 and 3, it isn't so simple to figure out what to multiply to get 5,681. In fact, large numbers are so difficult to factor that it took a team of supercomputers six months to factor a 150-digit number, Monroe said. The computers searched through millions of numbers by trial and error before pro- ducing their result - a task perfectly suited for a quan- tum computer, which stores its information in atoms. "Quantum computers could factor numbers fast, if we could ever build one," he said. "If you could factor efficiently, you could break codes." In a regular computer, each input to the computer This means that each atom in a quantum computer - called a quantum "bit," or qubit - could represent mul- tiple inputs simultaneously. Unlike in a regular computer, where each bit represents either a 0 or a 1, each qubit can denote 0, 1 or both 0 and 1 at the same time. To understand how quantum objects like atoms behave, Monroe and his research group study single atoms trapped in a vacuum. The atoms must be studied in a vacuum because, through an oddity of quantum physics, they only exhibit quantum behavior when they are neither observed nor in contact with other matter. "We use trapped ions - these are atoms with an elec- tron stripped off, so it's a charged atom," said Rackham student Patty Lee, one of Monroe's graduate students. The charged ions can then be trapped and manipulated using an electric field, she said. Lasers are used to observe the atoms after manipula- tion, and to change their state if necessary, Lee added. In March, Monroe's group made a particularly important advance. They managed to show "entan- glement" between a photon, or a particle of light, and an atom. Entanglement means that the atom's state and the photon's state are linked - if the photon is observed in one state, the atom must also exist in that state at the moment the photon is observed. Monroe's group is one of only three groups in the world that have shown entanglement between particles, Lee said. The work was published in the March issue of the journal Nature. Entanglement is important for quantum computing because it allows simultaneous control of many par- ticles, said Rackham student Mark Acton, another of Monroe's students. Chains of entangled qubits can rep- resent many large numbers at once by denoting many states of 0 and 1. "If you had many ions entangled, if you do some- Toxic algae increases i Mich. lakes MUSKEGON (AP) - A potent group of toxic compounds has been discovered in a com- mon algae found in Muskegon Lake and the poi- sons, blamed on the invasive zebra mussels, may be present in other Michigan lakes. Imported to the Great Lakes by freighters, the mollusks have increased water clarity in lakes by eating algae as they filter huge volumes of water through their tiny bodies. A down side is that zebra mussels eat only nutritious -algae - they spit out algae con- taining toxic compounds. The result: Blue-green algal blooms, which can contain microcystins, are proliferating in relatively clean lakes across Michigan and other states, including Muskegon and White lakes, Lake Leelanau in northern Michigan. When exposed to humans, microcystins can cause skin irritations and abdominal pain. The blooms create a blue-green layer of scum on the water's surface that looks like floating paint. Scientists who recently tested algae scum on Muskegon Lake found elevat- ed concentrations of microcystins. "I don't want to scare people, but the lev- els of microcystins we found are significant." said Gary Fahnenstiel, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Lake Michigan Field Station. "These are very high concentrations and are on the same order of magnitude as the highest concentrations of microcystins ever reported." Fahnenstiel, a leading expert on algae, said people should avoid swimming, wading, wind- surfing, canoeing or water-skiing in areas of ~IKr. -E UL LOUO L~IIy U' I 1) ort. - syo un-is - onroe TOP: Mark Acton points out to David Hucul the series of lenses and mirrors used in his group's Ion trapping device. Hucul and Acton conduct research for physics Prof. Chris Monroe. BOTTOM: A close-up of the ion trap that allows the group to capture images of single ions and study quantum physics that may apply to quantum computing in the future.