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The CDC put out new estimates today on the first six months of the swine flu (H1N1) pandemic in the U.S. A few quick numbers: 22 million cases, 98,000 hospitalizations, 3,900 deaths.

So what do those numbers mean?

“There’s this incredible magical thinking about health-care IT,” Jack Cochran said. “Once you put it in, health care will be saved.”

Cochran is an M.D. who runs the national umbrella organization for groups of Kaiser docs, and he was a practicing plastic surgeon for years, so he’s seen his fair share of health-care IT implementations. The subject came up this week when he dropped by the Health Blog’s office.

A cat in Iowa got swine flu. It got better. The cat apparently caught the disease from a person who it lived with, the American Veterinary Medical Association said today.

The cat joins pigs, turkeys and a few ferrets that have been diagnosed with H1N1. In general, the disease appears to spread from people to animals, rather than the other way around.

Different strains of flu infect all sorts of animals — seals, whales, horses, tigers, dogs, chickens.

The FDA approved Merck’s Gardasil vaccine for use in boys and men ages 9-26, the company said today. The vaccine protects against some strains of HPV, the virus that causes cervical cancer in women; today’s approval was for using the vaccine to prevent genital warts, which are also caused by HPV.

For a few years now, researchers have been looking at what role a virus called XMRV plays in prostate cancer. A study published today in Science suggests the virus may also be linked to chronic fatigue syndrome. But the picture is still cloudy, and it’s not clear whether the virus actually causes prostate cancer or CFS. Here’s the story from the WSJ.

Americans started getting vaccinated against the swine flu yesterday. But millions of people may still have to wait weeks before there’s enough vaccine available for everyone in this country who wants it, the WSJ reports. At the same time, millions more who are at high risk for complications from the disease may choose to go without the vaccine.

Warning: If you get fired after a company investigation finds you harassed employees and used company money to fix your house, you could wind up having to repay millions of dollars you collected in salary and bonuses.

A British schoolgirl died yesterday, a few hours after getting a shot of a vaccine designed to prevent cervical cancer. It’s still unclear whether the vaccine, GlaxoSmithKline’s Cervarix, contributed to the girl’s death.

More than 1.4 million people have been given the vaccine in the U.K. since an immunization program launched last year, and there have been no reports of deaths linked to the vaccine, the Times of London reports.

AIDS researchers are excited about today’s vaccine trial results — not because they think this particular vaccine will be used widely in patients, but because they hope that unpacking the promising but modest study results will lead them to develop stronger, more effective vaccines.

To that end, they’ll be trying to answer a fundamental question: Why did the vaccine protect some people but not others?

Children six months to 17 years old appear to respond to and tolerate well the H1N1 flu vaccine, according to new data from a 600-child federally funded clinical trial.

The early results from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases trial on children’s response to vaccination is consistent with results published recently on vaccine response in adults — that one dose of the vaccine is likely to work for most kids.