Day 3 of H1N1 Q&A with Dr. Lana

BUFFALO, NY (WIVB) - The H1N1 vaccine is expected to be available by mid-October, but people still have so many questions about it's safety and effectiveness.

News 4 is continuing it's weeklong series about the swine flu with Dr. Steven Lana, the Buffalo school district's medical director.

QUESTION: Testing of the vaccine was so rushed, how do we know it's safe and/or effective?

"It's a catch 22 situation. The vaccine development had to be expected otherwise we would have missed the opportunity to prevent disease. Having said that, do we know for sure? No, we can't know for sure, cause it hasn't happened yet.

Here's what we do know. We do know that we're using the exact same techniques, same science, same manufacturing process has been used to produce other vaccines, so basically this is the same vaccine with different face on it.

So there's every reason to believe that if previous flu vaccines were safe and effective using the same production technology, that H1N1 vaccine should be as well."

QUESTION: How does the vaccine work?

"The idea behind any vaccinations is to produce a product, a killed virus that has surface characteristics of the wild virus, the nasty bad virus.. and to expose that to the immune system so the immune system recognizes what the virus looks like when it gets exposed to it in the real world and has prepared in advance anti-bodies that will block that virus from causing infection."

QUESTION: Is the season flu vaccine more effective than the h1n1 vaccine?

"It's produced a year before we expect to see the virus and it's production is based on estimates of what's anticipated, so they're usually pretty good, sometimes off a little bit. With H1N1 there's no doubt it's gonna be a 100% match, because we know what virus the vaccine needs to manufacture for. So in fact, H1N1 vaccine should be more effective than seasonal flu vaccine."