Investigations: Health Workers Won't Get H1N1 Shot Amid Side-Effect Concerns

Only half of health-care workers in two separate studies in the UK and Hong Kong plan to get the vaccine against the H1N1 virus that is now being fast-tracked to be ready by mid-October. So says this story in Britain's leading medical weekly Pulse - a survey of 115 UK doctors - and this item in the British Medical Journal on a Hong Kong poll of 2,255 health employees. And a poll by Nursing Times cited in this BMJ story found just 37 percent of nurses planned to get vaccinated. The Hong Kong respondents refusing the vaccine cited fear of side-effects and concerns about efficacy.

The Pulse piece also cited a study in the journal Emerging Health Threats that found the public is skeptical about novel vaccines introduced amid epidemics, citing concerns about lack of safety testing.

The studies follow these stories in the Times of London and Daily Mail on concerns about the fast-tracked vaccine at the UK's Health Protection Agency. The agency sent a letter to neurologists noting that an earlier vaccine rushed into use amid a similar swine flu outbreak in the U.S. in 1976 may have led to an eight-fold increase in cases of a brain disorder called Guillain-Barre Syndrome, which causes paralysis and can be fatal. That flu outbreak caused one death, while side-effects from the vaccine killed 25. The vaccine was withdrawn after 10 weeks of use, and the U.S. government had to compensate claimants.

TAGS: health, flu, H1N1

Investigations: Insider Trading Profits From U.S. Coup Decisions

Coups are good for business! Stocks of U.S. companies with operations abroad rose 1.4 percent in the four days after the U.S. government authorized a coup d'état in the country where the companies were based - and three percent in the 13 days after such a decision. That's the interesting revelation in a new study by economists at Harvard, Berkeley and Stockholm University.

Note that they're talking about the time right after the coup was authorized, not the time after it actually took place. More stock increases were found after the coup authorization than after the coup itself, raising questions about insider trading based on knowledge of the coming coup or buying by U.S. government personnel with that knowledge. Read Slate's story on the study here.

TAGS: corruption, military

Investigations: Who Funds the Taliban? We Do!

As Afghans prepare to go to the polls to elect their president on Aug. 20, a growing pile of reports is revealing the widespread drug-fuelled corruption of this country that Hilary Clinton has dubbed a "narco state." Observers told me for a story I did in Saturday's Montreal Gazette that the corruption is so bad it is helping to fuel the Taliban.

Now, an interesting story in the GlobalPost.com suggests that the Taliban's main source of funding isn't drugs (in fact, they get only a small fraction of the country's $3.4-billion U.S. opium trade) but rather protection money from the boom of Western development projects in the nation.

The piece says the funds come through high-level negotiations between the Taliban and major contractors. In other words, we fund the Taliban! The story is part of a GlobalPost series on Afghanistan, including its history and a look at the U.S. counterinsurgency facility in Kabul.

TAGS: corruption, drugs, Afghanistan