Children as young as 10 years old will need just one H1N1 flu jab, according to a US federal study of about 600 children released Monday. The finding is a relief to public health systems, since as recently as early September officials expected that even adults might need 2 shots, writes the Washington Post.

This should lower demand for the vaccine, which is expected to be unusually high this year, since the H1N1 strain of the influenza virus is striking a much younger segment of the population than normal. French pharmaceutical firm Sanofi, one of five which will produce the flu vaccine in the US, announced yesterday that it will release the first batch of its vaccine for the US market in mid-October. It expects to ramp production capacity up to 800 million vaccines a year. US demand is normally less than 100 million a year, according to the Associated Press.

Want the bad news? Keep reading…

The Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council, parts of the National Academies of Science, released a report today which says that “significant weaknesses undermine the global community’s abilities to prevent, detect early, and respond efficiently to potentially deadly species-crossing microbes, such as the pandemic H1N1 influenza virus,” according to a press release. Basically the academies are reminding us that most public health funding goes to investigating diseases which directly infect humans, and that less funding goes to animal-borne diseases such as swine flu.

The full report lays out a plan for a global human and animal health surveillance system which one committee member compared favorably to the ad hoc systems “that have been marshaled time and again to respond to the individual ‘disease du jour’ as each has arisen.”

See the Great Beyond’s coverage of the kickoff of the youth study: US kiddie flu shot trials underway, 21 August 2009