news on a possible vaccine-Please Read

I'm sure they have already in some form or another for the time being for a particular strain.  What they have of it will probably all go to the military.

Normal people will not see any vaccine for a year or more if we're lucky. Prepare to ride it out anyway.

Experts Skeptical of Experimental Birdflu Vaccines

USA: February 6, 2006

WASHINGTON -" Two teams working on better vaccines for use against a
potential bird flu pandemic have announced progress in the past week,
but influenza experts are skeptical.

The two labs both used a human cold virus, called an adenovirus, to carry
pieces of DNA from H5N1 flu in a vaccine. Both labs - one at the US
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and one at the University of
Pittsburgh Medical Center - were able to protect mice against fatal H5N1
infections.

But neither study was even mentioned at a meeting of top US flu experts
in Washington this week.

"It's just not that new," Dr. John Treanor, a flu vaccine expert at the
University of Rochester in New York, said in an interview. "There are a
zillion vaccines that protect in mice. On the grand scale of things, it's
nowhere near to being a vaccine you would see in humans."

But developing new vaccines is a time-consuming and tricky business,
and for the next few years the world is stuck with 40-year-old
technology, no matter what happens in the lab, the experts, including
manufacturers, said.

Researchers rely on an old-fashioned way of making vaccines against
influenza that requires the use of chicken eggs and months of cultivation.

Several companies and private labs are working on a vaccine against
H5N1. But because no one knows how it will mutate, they cannot be sure
that any vaccine made now would protect against whatever pandemic
strain eventually emerges.

Vaccines using cold viruses, using pure DNA, and using whole inactivated
viruses are all being tried.

But because they use completely novel technology, they would have to be
extensively tested in humans, who have different immune responses from
other animals.

Chris Viehbacher, President of GlaxoSmithKline, which makes flu
vaccines, said it would take years to approve entirely new approaches to
flu vaccine.

If a pandemic comes before vaccine technology can be improved, Glaxo
had counted on using the current vaccine formulation boosted with an
aluminum adjuvant, he said in an interview on Tuesday.

Adjuvants are added to vaccines to help increase the immune response
and may make it possible to stretch a vaccine supply.

Before boosting production and building new plants in the United States,
Viehbacher said drug makers wanted better protection from lawsuits from
people who may be harmed, or who may claim they were harmed, by
vaccines."

http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/34875/
story.htm]http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsi d/34875

Edited by Rick