There has been so much published about H1N1 swine flu in recent months that despite my keen interest in the topic (being an infectious diseases clinician involved with determining policy and strategic pandemic flu planning in my own hospital as well as looking after clinical cases), I can barely keep up with the medical aspects of the disease, never mind the rest of the information. But, as is ever the case, much of the other material that is in the public’s eye seems to be based on uninformed opinion and comment, rather than scientific facts.

Having been given space by the Daily Mail to write a column on vaccination two days ago, Dr Richard Halvorsen has today been given air-time by Radio 4. The programme is available here on iPlayer and an unverified transcript is available here.

Statistically speaking, the story that broke last night was tediously inevitable. 1.4 million doses of the Cervarix vaccine have been administered to teenage girls since the program began, and eventually - whether by chance or adverse reaction - one person was bound to die. Yesterday, for whatever reason, that teenage girl was Natalie Morton, and my sympathies go out to her kith and kin. Her death, and the manner of its reporting, will affect public health in ways she'll never know.

Guest post by British doctor DeeTee. See more by DeeTee here.

As the swine flu pandemic tightens its global grip, antivaccinationists far and wide are gearing up for their propaganda war against the H1N1 vaccine. Their objections, predictably enough, conform to the usual diet of antivaccine canards that they always employ to frighten people about vaccines, but the novelty of the current pandemic offers them unlimited scope for scaremongering among the millions of worried potential vaccine recipients.