With summer coming to a close, the United States is preparing for autumn's flu season. The Department of Health and Human Services said only 45 million doses of the vaccine against H1N1 (or "swine flu") will be ready in October, rather than the 120 million doses they had expected. While pregnant women and health care workers will be the first to get the two-dose vaccine, school-age children and teens are next in line. So who better to deliver those H1N1 vaccines than the schools themselves? In what could be the largest campaign since the polio vaccine in the 1950’s, schools across the country are preparing to inoculate their students. Joining us for a look at the supply of and demands for the H1N1 vaccine – and how it will be administered – is Dr. Maria Simbra. She’s the medical reporter for KDKA TV in Pittsburgh.

Thanks to the prospect of a mutated H1N1, Americans will enter this year's flu season with trepidation. Researchers are closer to developing vaccines, but the only way to verify that the immunizations are safe is to test them on human volunteers. We talk to one such brave subject, Gordon Potts, who got a vaccine yesterday. We also talk to Dr. Mark Mulligan, executive director of the Hope Clinic at the Emory Vaccine Center.

As the federal government prepares to release its recommendations for schools during flu season, The Takeaway talks to two workers on the front lines of the war on the flu. Ryan Kelley is the emergency medical services manager for the Imperial County Public Health Department in El Centro, California. He closed four schools last April because of confirmed swine flu cases, but is expecting a different approach during the upcoming school year. Kathleen Murphy is the health services coordinator for the Milwaukee Public Schools in Wisconsin. In addition to being in charge of Milwaukee's public school health services, Kathleen is also a nurse. Wisconsin was hit particularly hard with the H1N1 flu and the problem hasn't ebbed with the summer.

Parents are worried about the spread of H1N1 (or swine flu) when school starts up in September. In advance of potential outbreaks, the Obama administration is finalizing guidelines that could scale back government-recommended school closings in response to outbreaks of H1N1. The goal is to keep schools open as much as possible. This fall, federal authorities will recommend closures only under "extenuating circumstances," such as if a school has many children with underlying medical conditions or if many students or staff members are already sick. For more we turn to Spencer S. Hsu, a staff writer for the Washington Post.

A Centers for Disease Control advisory panel has recommended that pregnant women get top priority for an H1N1 vaccine when it is expected to become available this fall. How is this recommendation reverberating on the frontlines? The Takeaway turns to Dr. Richard Wenzel, an epidemiologist and Chairman of the Department of Internal Medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University, who has just returned from studying the spread of the flu in South America. Also joining the conversation are Leila Laniado, an Atlanta resident who is 5 months pregnant and weighing her options, and Dr. Laura Riley, an OB/GYN at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston explains what she is telling her patients about the vaccine.

Experts said our interconnected world was going to make outbreaks like H1N1 far worse than those that came before. But author Steven Johnson says that information spreads faster than people do, and that's what will keep us safe. This is thanks to what he calls "information ubiquity," which is the same force behind the decline of newspapers and the rise of e-readers like the Kindle. Johnson is the author of a recent book about the 1854 cholera epidemic in London called The Ghost Map as well as Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, and his most recent book is The Invention of Air. He is also the founder of hyper-local reporting site Outside.In.

For more, read Steven Johnson's article in the Wall Street Journal, How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write.

Looks like H1N1 virus, still more popularly known as the swine flu, is waning in Mexico. The virus has sickened at least 245 people in the U.S., and killed a young boy. So what lies ahead? Obviously no one (except maybe psychic John Edwards) knows for sure, but some disease trackers are mapping a possible course. How? Well, a computer simulation out of Northwestern University is taking inspiration from an unusual source: the dollar bill. Donald McNeil Jr, Science reporter for our partner, The New York Times, joins The Takeaway with a look at how the virus might spread in the U.S.

For more, read Donald G. McNeil Jr.'s article, Predicting Flu With the Aid of (George) Washington, in today's New York Times.