Combo Vaccines Show Promise against Bird Flu

Due to the various strains of avian flu, over 150 million birds have been killed, according to the World Health Organization.

Wiping out poultry flocks have contained outbreaks in Asia and Europe, but vaccines so far have proven either ineffective or difficult to administer. The upside is that two independant groups have figured out some interesting ways that may help vaccinate birds.

But now two independent groups of researchers have shown that incorporating the proteins of various strains of bird flu into an existing virus vaccine can yield effective protection for birds.
Newcastle disease virus (NDV) is a bird killer that has been controlled by routine vaccination in the developed world. Molecular biologist Angela Römer-Oberdörfer of the Friedrich-Loeffler-Institut in Germany and her colleagues inserted a gene controlling expression of a key flu protein into NDV's genome. The resulting vaccine proved nonlethal in chicks and provoked NDV and flu antibodies in 92 percent of inoculated chickens after three weeks. Vaccinated chickens proved immune to infection by NDV and the H5N2 flu strain that provided the original gene. Naive chickens exposed to either disease invariably died.

I am really hoping that by finding a working vaccination for the birds, we can at the least slow the opportunities for the bird flu to change to a human transmittable disease.

Combo Vaccines Show Promise against Bird Flu [Scientific American]

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Combo Vaccines Show Promise against Bird Flu

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