The health care debate appears to be so intoxicating that even ninth-graders want to discuss the hows and whys of expanding coverage.

During a 20-minute question and answer period with 32 students on Tuesday before his national back to school address at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Va., President Obama took a query from a student who identified himself as Sean.

Why, Sean asked from what appeared to be a prepared question, does the United States lack universal health care when 36 other countries have such a system?

On the day Cabinet secretaries and public health officials briefed President Obama on strategies for containing H1N1 flu, the National Institutes of Health released alarming but not entirely unexpected findings indicating H1N1 out-competes other seasonal flu viruses, and may be more communicable, too.

University of Maryland researchers who infected ferrets with both H1N1 and other strains of influenza found H1N1 outmuscled the other viruses to become he dominant strain and was transmitted more easily from the infected animals to uninfected ferrets. The good news was researchers found no evidence that the new swine flu combines with other viruses to form the sort of superbug health officials most dread.

"These new data, while preliminary, underscore the need for vaccinating against both seasonal influenza and the 2009 H1N1 influenza this fall and winter," said Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the division of NIH that funded the work.