Tracking the next pandemic: Avian Flu Talk |
WHY VACCINES MAY NOT WORK |
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Posted: January 28 2006 at 10:34am |
Bird flu nightmare needs wake-up call
“Developing a vaccine against H5N1 is like targeting a clay pigeon. You have to shoot ahead of the target to allow the bullet and clay to intersect. Unfortunately H5N1 is a pigeon that does random, sudden 90 degree turns. It is the ultimate moving target. The time to develop and manufacture a global vaccine is six to eight months. By that time, the avian flu virus will likely have mutated into a form that is immune to the vaccine.” http://edinburghnews.scotsman.com/opinion.cfm?id=142622006 ---------- Evololutionary Biology - insights “The model does not aim to predict the emergence of new strains of influenza, but it does suggest that a short-lived general immunity to the virus might affect the virus's evolution.” “We therefore inferred that there must be some other form of interaction between strains happening in the population,” he said. “The best fit to genetic data was obtained when a secondary, non-specific immune response was included in the model, on top of the normal adaptive immune response which recognizes individual virus strains. This secondary response gives a person complete protection against nearly all variants of the influenza virus, but only for a short period of time.” This kind of protection, said Ferguson, would last only for perhaps weeks after infection, after which it would fade, rendering a person vulnerable to reinfection with a different viral strain. __________ [ Edited by Rick |
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