Objective:To assess the effect of seasonal influenza vaccination during pregnancy on laboratory-confirmed influenza in infants to 6 months of age.Design: Nonrandomized, prospective, observational cohort study.Setting: Navajo and White Mountain Apache Indian reservations, including 6 hospitals on the Navajo reservation and 1 on the White Mountain Apache reservation.Participants: A total of 1169 mother-infant pairs with mothers who delivered an infant during 1 of 3 influenza seasons.Main Exposure: Maternal seasonal influenza vaccination. Main Outcome Measures:In infants, laboratoryconfirmed influenza, influenzalike illness (ILI), ILI hospitalization, and influenza hemagglutinin inhibition antibody titers.Results: A total of 1160 mother-infant pairs had serum collected and were included in the analysis. Among infants, 193 (17%) had an ILI hospitalization, 412 (36%) had only an ILI outpatient visit, and 555 (48%) had no ILI episodes. The ILI incidence rate was 7.2 and 6.7 per 1000 person-days for infants born to unvaccinated and vaccinated women, respectively. There was a 41% reduction in the risk of laboratory-confirmed influenza virus infection (relative risk, 0.59; 95% confidence interval, 0.37-0.93) and a 39% reduction in the risk of ILI hospitalization (relative risk, 0.61; 95% confidence interval, 0.45-0.84) for infants born to influenzavaccinated women compared with infants born to unvaccinated mothers. Infants born to influenzavaccinated women had significantly higher hemagglutinin inhibition antibody titers at birth and at 2 to 3 months of age than infants of unvaccinated mothers for all 8 influenza virus strains investigated.Conclusions: Maternal influenza vaccination was significantly associated with reduced risk of influenza virus infection and hospitalization for an ILI up to 6 months of age and increased influenza antibody titers in infants through 2 to 3 months of age.

We report on the development of a method that records spatially dependent intensity patterns of polarized light that is diffusely backscattered from highly scattering media. It is demonstrated that these intensity patterns can be used to differentiate turbid media, such as polystyrene-sphere and biological-cell suspensions. Our technique employs polarized light from a He-Ne laser (l=543nm), which is focused onto the surface of the scattering medium. A surface area of approximately 4x4 cm centered on the light input point is imaged through polarization-analysis optics onto a CCD camera. One can observe a large variety of intensity patterns by varying the polarization state of the incident laser light and changing the analyzer configuration to detect different polarization components of the backscattered light. Introducing the Mueller-matrix concept for diffusely backscattered light, a framework is provided to select a subset of measurements that comprehensively describe the optical properties of backscattering media.

ILITARY PERSONNEL ARE prone to outbreaks of respiratory illness such as influenza for a variety of reasons, including crowding and stressful conditions. 1-3 Before the availability of an influenza vaccine, the military population experienced high mortality and morbidity during such outbreaks. Trivalent inactivated vaccine (TIV), administered intramuscularly, was first developed and tested in the military in the 1940s and has been used annually since the 1950s to prevent influenza and its complications. 4 In 2003, a live attenuated influenza vaccine (LAIV) with the same antigenic characteristics as TIV was formulated for intranasal application and approved for use among healthy adults. Service members were immediately targeted for LAIV use by the US Department of Defense (DOD) because of the ease of vaccine administration and availability early in the season. During the TIV vaccine shortage in 2004, the DOD agreed to preferentially use LAIV to increase the availability of TIV. 5 Although TIV remained the predominant vaccine until the 2006-2007 season, LAIV has increasingly become the preferred vaccine for service members while TIV is reserved for those with higher risk for respiratory diseases or contraindications to LAIV. 6,7 Recent clinical trials comparing LAIV with TIV suggest that LAIV has superior efficacy over TIV among young

These findings indicate that American Indian infants with high concentrations of maternally derived RSV neutralizing antibodies are protected from RSV hospitalization before 6 months of age. However, these antibodies do not modify the severity of illness once disease has occurred. The basis for elevated rates of RSV disease among American Indian infants cannot be attributed to a failure of maternal RSV neutralizing antibodies to confer protection.

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