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
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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.
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