Bird flu vaccine '10 years away'

By Matt McGrath
Science reporter, BBC News

Avian flu experts meeting in Paris have been told that a viable vaccine against the human form of the disease could take 10 years to develop.

Dr David Fedson, a retired professor of medicine, told the conference that there were well-documented problems with the H5N1 virus when it came to making a vaccine.

Scientists normally grow such a vaccine from an inert form of a virus, using chicken eggs as their favourite growing medium.

According to Dr Fedson, who also worked for a number of years in the vaccine manufacturing industry, the vaccine produced from H5N1 was proving particularly difficult to grow up.

It was also proving ineffective at stimulating an immune response that would give a person a good defence against bird flu.

He told BBC News: "Right now, worldwide, we can produce 300 million doses of seasonal flu vaccine, but it turns out that the H5N1 vaccine is so poorly immunogenic and replicates so poorly that... we could immunise globally, with six months of production, about 100 million people.

"From a public health point of view this is catastrophic," the former professor of medicine at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, US, said.

"We have had reverse genetics H5N1 viruses available to work with for three years and after three years this is all we can say: 'We could produce enough vaccine worldwide, for 100 million people'. Is that good enough? I don't think so."

Leadership 'needed'

Dr Fedson's views were echoed by Professor Albert Osterhaus, a leading European virologist based at the Erasmus Medical Centre, Rotterdam.

He was involved in decoding the virus behind the Sars (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) epidemic.

He told the meeting that a global influenza task force was needed to get to grips with the situation.


Full article:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5132910.stm