Thursday, October 05, 2006

October 5 Flu Update


We're going north to see the colors, so the blog will not be updated again until Sunday night.

OK. Who knew the State Department even had a special representative on avian and pandemic influenza? And who knew you had to call him ambassador? And who knew the US had "state of the art" flu prep?

More on the Indonesian case reported yesterday.

An Indonesian vet says that the bird flu can be carried by healthy chickens. I have no idea if this is actually true.

Indonesia is going to help a company from Singapore test a rapid flu test. It does without saying that this could be really important.

Baxter says it has a bird flu vaccine that is effective against multiple strains. Testing is early, but the vaccine is cell-based.

"This is the first clinical demonstration that a candidate H5N1 vaccine can induce antibodies that neutralize widely divergent strains of H5N1," said Dr. Hartmut Ehrlich, vice president of global research and development for Baxter's bioscience business. "These preliminary data, which must be confirmed in a larger study, suggest that the vaccine may provide wider protection for a larger number of people before and during a pandemic."


A Vice-Minister of Agriculture cast grim warnings on China's ability to battle an autumn virus.

Promed on the Chinese outbreak among birds.

Recombinomics has looked at genetic sequences from the Chinese samples, and say they prove that viruses change through recombination.

Recombinomics also says this indicates a pandemic concern.

The above comments confirm that the recent bird sequences overlap the human sequences in time and location, but still fail to match, indicating the vast majority of human H5N1 sequences are from a source other than most of the H5N1 infected poultry in Indonesia.


Mauritania has submitted its pandemic plan at an international conference.

Baylor University has done some more work on adjuvants.

From Australia: pandemic flu and business continuity planning.

2 Comments:

At 12:22 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Just in case no-one has told you yet, fluwiki has started a new "Pandemic Flu Awareness Week" with the topic: "it's time to stop talking about bird flu and start preparing for pandemic flu".

http://www.fluwikie.com has links to a Q&A and to at least a couple of press-releases.

Please help us get the word out!

Thanks for your impressive great fantastic blog.

 
At 9:27 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Free Guide to Pandemic Bird Flu Preparedness is available at www.pandemicinfosite.com

 

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