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Hopes of bird flu vaccine

London: The prospects for preventing millions of deaths in a flu pandemic have improved with the announcement on Wednesday by U.S. scientists that they have engineered a vaccine that protects mice from the sort of strains that killed people in Turkey. Suryaprakash Sambhara of the Centres for Disease Control in Atlanta, and Suresh Mittal from Purdue University, write in an article published online by the Lancet that they have found a way of making a vaccine that protects against not just one but different strains of the virus. The vaccine was created by genetically modifying a common cold virus, producing a protein called H5HA which is a component of H5N1, bird flu. The researchers found that vaccinated mice did not die when infected with H5N1. The H5HA vaccine generated specific T cells - something that conventional flu vaccines do not do. The fact that the vaccine also protects against more than one strain of H5N1 is important because bird flu is adept at mutating.

— © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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