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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.

Well, if you"re Australian scientist Mark Kendall, you answer that question by designing a vaccine system that provides the same protection as a regular shot, but only uses a fraction of the vaccine.

Kendall and his team at Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology in Brisbane are working on a small patch that would stretch what little vaccine will be ready by flu season across a much larger segment of the population.

The patch is smaller than a fingertip. One side is covered in small spikes coated in dried vaccine. Unlike the normal flu vaccine shot, which punches deep into tissue before the immune system eventually finds, identifies, and responds to the virus, the patch barely penetrates the skin at all.

That seems likely to work well: because the skin forms the body"s first line of defense against the infectious outside world, a dense layer of immune cells resides just below the surface. Rather than bypassing those cells, as a regular shot does, the patch targets them directly. By injecting the vaccine into those immune cells, the patch can provoke the same immune response as a shot with significantly less vaccine.

The patch isn"t ready quite yet, but the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council has fast-tracked the program, in the hope that Kendall and his team can win the race against the coming flu season.

[via Nanowerk]

Before swine flu swept through the U.S., the virus had bounced around South America undetected for years. The H1N1 strain caught scientists by surprise, and without a vaccine. But a few weeks before the first North American case popped up, researchers successfully tested a therapy that could knock out almost any flu, and possibly any virus.

Conventional vaccines packed with inert versions of a flu strain give your immune system the chance to develop antibodies. These identify that strain’s particular version of hemagglutinin, a lollipop-shaped protein on its surface, so your body knows what to kill if infected. Every strain’s hemagglutinin has a slightly different head, so Robert Liddington, a biologist at the Burnham Institute for Medical Research in California, went after its stalk. “The lollipop head changes quite easily from generation to generation, but the stalk remains stable,” he says. “It’s the flu’s Achilles’ heel.” His team found a rare antibody that targets it, injected it into mice, and exposed them to 10 times the lethal dose of several seasonal flu strains, the H5N1 bird flu and the pandemic-causing 1918 Spanish flu. The drug staved off serious infection in each case, even if administered 72 hours after the initial exposure.

Liddington says the trick might work on viruses with similar proteins, such as HIV, but he is fast-tracking the flu drug, wrapping up tests in ferrets before handing it to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to oversee human trials. “Considering the recent outbreaks, expedience is the rule.”

The Hajj, a journey to Mecca that retraces the steps of Mohammed, is one of the religious pillars of Islam. Pilgrims making the Hajj are the primary reason why Saudi Arabia is one of the world"s most visited tourist spots. Like a religious version of Orlando, Mecca and Medina draw about three million visitors every year, from every country in the world.

Unfortunately, the date for this year"s Hajj, November 25th to the 29th, falls right smack dab in the middle of flu season, and Muslim countries from Morocco to Indonesia have begun wrestling with the problem of religious duty in a swine-flu world.

According to the New York Times, Egypt has already banned the elderly and the very young from participating in this year"s Hajj, and some Arabic-language newspapers have called for Saudi Arabia to cancel this year"s pilgrimage altogether. Additionally, Sunni and Shiite religious authorities, two groups of people that rarely agree on anything, have both decreed this year"s Hajj optional, and said that altering plans due to swine flu fears doesn"t violate any religious laws.

In other flu news, the World Health Organization (WHO) raised the total number of deaths as a result of the new H1N1 pandemic to 700 worldwide, and predicts that the number will jump significantly in the fall and winter with the start of flu season.

Of course, there"s some good news for the start of flu season, as have begun, and the U.S. government has blocked out $1.8 billion for emergency spending when the flu hits again.

And this wouldn"t be a flu post if there wasn"t some bad news to go along with that good news. The bad news is that more and more flu cases are proving to be drug-resistant, with the latest Tamiflu-resistant bug showing up in a 60-year-old Canadian woman. In some other bad news, the WHO worries that rich countries like the U.S. and the UK will buy up all the flu vaccine, leaving poorer, more populous countries without any remedy for the flu.

That about wraps up the latest flu news, but, as the dog days of summer give way to the brisk chill of autumn, stay tuned.