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Bird Flu May Be Developing Drug Resistance
Pingular writes "The virus currently causing bird flu in humans may be developing resistance to the only drug that can so far combat the infection. From the article: 'A previous paper in the journal Nature described a single case of drug resistance in a patient being treated for avian flu. However, in this case the patient had been given low doses of Tamiflu before becoming infected, as a family member had been stricken. Lead researcher Dr Jeremy Farrar described the latest findings as "very worrying" - but said they were not surprising.'"
Tamiflu was never expected to be a completely effective counter to a mutated strain of bird flu. It might help some people for a short time, which is great of course, but we'll still need a tailored vaccine that currently takes a few months to produce if we're going to beat it on a wide scale. This is why the medical profession is so worried about it, and why so much effort is currently focussed on cutting the time from identifying the mutated strain to availability of a matching vaccine.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
affected Roche financially more info here .
Unpretentious Sydney reviews by unqualified Sydney reviewers
at this time of year...
... President Bush decides to bomb the Canary Islands in a bid to stop a global flu outbreak...
It is good for you that humans have yet to invent a means of quickly traveling from continent to continet...
It is also good that the bird flu is not tranfered from human to human...
My understanding is that one problem here is that Tamiflu is currently the only drug of any use. If there is more than one treatment available, then combination treatments can be used and so cut down the rate at which resistance arises.
I guess the reality is that we can't really be sure what will work and what will not work until after the virus has mutated enough to spread from human to human. And let's hope that never happens. Or, if it has to happen, that the mutation weakens the virus enough to keep things small scale.
I'm a little dubious about Tamiflu. A problem with piling up supplies of Tamiflu at home, for example, is that if you get a bug, how can you know without a test that it is the killer bug? The risk is that you may have a standard bug and then mistakenly use your one and only heavy artillery round on the wrong target. After that, you are foobarred.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
What do you all recommend we need to stock up on before this bird flu gets out of hand?
Am i the only one noticing the lack of from the ... dept.?
I therefore, propose i new one: - from the chickens-urged-to-regulate-antibiotics-use dept.
There are too many instances where people will not finish the prescribed antibiotics and/or then share the remainder with someone who has 'similar' symptoms. Unfortunately, this allows/encourages microbes to alter their structure and become resistant.
After reading the article, it sounds possible in this instance that - because the individual had recently been previously given Tamiflu for a different reason - the virus was given the opportunity to develop resistance. There is also the possibility that the Tamiflu did not work because its mechanism (inhibition of influenza virus neuraminidase, with the possibility of alteration of virus particle aggregation and release) has specific peak/load times based upon exposure or prophylaxis - and again, the individual had already been dosed.
But what that means is that the virus undergoes mutations at a certain rate. And eventually one of those mutations might lead to resistance to the drug. All the other variants will be destroyed but that very small population which has the resistance will spread very rapidly.
That is why some say that not taking the full dose of antibiotics and using antibiotic soaps in homes can lead to the breeding of super-bacteria. A problem bigger than bird flu at this moment is antibiotic resistant staph bacteria (methicillin-resistant S. aureus aka MRSA). When you hear about people getting sicker just by being in the hospital - they probably caught MRSA. The deadliness and the number of cases from such infections have gone up even though it would make sense for them to go down with all the advances in medicine and hygiene. Some speculate that soon there will be another strain of staph bacteria (VRSA) vancomycin resistant S. aureus which would pretty much be resistant to all the known anti-biotics. All that has to happen is for microorganisms to mutate and spread faster than it takes for us to find new antibiotics.
Did you even read all of that BBC story? http://www.biota.com.au/products/relenza.html (The original and still the best.)
Flu develops resistance to birds.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
of the guy who led the Tamiflu development team. She was exteremely bright, very cute and completely dyslexic and I completely failed to make any kind of romantic impact on her. Curse my failed dreams of marrying into a monied geek/scientist family!
:)
Yes completely offtopic and mod me whichever way you like
I don't read your sig, why do you read mine?
The real solution, and I think everyone will agree with me on this, is to kill all the birds.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
the virus can fly from person to person you moron, its not called bird for nothing. Soon we will all be infected.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
No need to worry, unless you eat uncooked chicken or live on a chicken farm. That pretty much stands even if you live in the affected area of Asia.
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
im not a big fan of the human race... too many idiots. im not going to be happy until 92% of the worlds population is wiped out. what? i want to keep an extra 3% of idiots for hard labor. :)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
fyi - foobarred doesn't really mean anything.... fubar is a military term for f-ed up beyond all recognition, so really, you could say, "After that, you are fubar."
Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. - Dr. Seuss
Is anyone else disturbed that Nature is publishing papers based on a single data point? I mean, I guess the original article may have included additional case studies, and this one was the one anomoly...*shrug*
Here's a question that has been bothering me for a while. The various health agencies have believed for a while that it is possible that the H5N1 virus could mutate into a form that spreads easily among humans. Of course, they cannot know in advance what that mutation will be, and once the mutation appears it will take 18-24 months to develop a vaccine for that specific strain.
So - wouldn't it have made sense to create a vaccine for H5N1 itself, and add that to this year's usual 3-flu cocktail? My understanding is that the human immune system maintains a library of antibodies for viruses that have challenged it in the past. Wouldn't there be a greater liklihood that an H5N1Mutant antibody could be developed if there was already an H5N1 antibody in the library? Again, my understanding is that the difference in surface structure between the primary and the mutant is usually fairly small.
Am I oversimplifing things too much? Or would there be a danger that vaccinating people for H5N1 would actually _increase_ the chance of the mutant developing?
Enlightenment from people who deal with the squishy stuff would be appreciated.
sPh
Then he'll capture Big Bird and hold a press meeting. "We got'em" will ring on the 6pm news across the nation once again.
Can I bum a sig?
We can also stop AIDS and other communciable diseases in humans by killing them as well.
Can I bum a sig?
It's Incompetent Design that created the resistant virus. It's been hiding, err somewhere... until now.
I've heard that Tamiflu is preferred for political reasons. Maybe there's actually something wrong with Arbidol, but here in Moscow they claim that Arbidol can cure bird flu in their rather widespread advertisements and aren't driven to court for that.
1: Tamiflu doesn't cure the disease, it "treats" the flu, meaning it lessens the symptoms of it. One of the reasons people die from the flu is their lymph system becomes so clogged due to immunological response they literrally cease breathing and die, which is why tamiflu helps as it lessens the response and keeps most people from dieing.
4 11.htm
2: How can the bird flu develope a resistance to it, especially since it isn't an epidemic yet? How many people have been infected? How many DECADES did it take for us to get antibiotic-resistant bacteria? The article bases it's premise on 2 people dieing. Is that thorough research?
3: Donald Rumsfield has lots of stock in the company which produces tamiflu, so there is a polticial reason for the BBC to talk about it.
http://www.emediawire.com/releases/2005/11/emw304
4: Allright, now I'v been reading the peanut butter factory material (conspiracy nut --> nuttier than a tin of PB --> Get a bunch of them together...Peanut butter factory) for quite some time, mabye 3 or 4 years. See this finely tuned BS detector, notice the flashing lights and buzzing sounds indicating a positive affirmation?
Notice how they build you upto the conclusion in the first "paragraph" of worldwide pandemic by stating how many people have died? Then they go onto talk about how some guy happened to die from bird flu when being given tamiflu and it not curing him.
But here's the kicker; the last 2 paragraphs call for...guess? More funding for big pharma and reassuring us we're protected by the government.
The BBC has done this stuff before, and they'll do it again. Usually their reporting is pretty good, but sometimes they crank out a cowpatty like this.
5: And for those of you who are afraid of bird flu, it's a hoax. The WHO has been yelling at the top of it's lungs for YEARS about a worldwide pandemic coming out of chinese chicken feedlots and nothing has come yet. Has it happened? Yep, several times infact, and it comes every year right when our bodies shut down vitamin D production due to less light decreasing our immunity to said diseases. It comes from foreign countries who already have regular flu, and it mutates in feedlots and in sweatshops year round and you get it from opening that nice new fresh third-world-smelling toy truck or consumer electronic. Is a massive worldwide plague going to happen? It's on such a low order of probability that it might as well not happen.
I personally am a believer in preperation for any event, but letting the government take care of you is hogwash, which is why they're encouraging people not to worry about it and let them take care of it. Because if canadian geese begin turning up dead all over the place (good riddance; it's overdue) in the USA due to birdflu, then bush will have his martial law because it's a pandemic; the laws are already in place, they were passed SPECIFICLALY DUE TO bird flu if you check around a few months ago. And it'll eventually find it's way over here mind you, they know it and we know it. As birds migrate from China to Europe (and have already) they'll pass it along to birds there which'll pass it along to birds here somehow; chicken feed, imported chicken, ect. They want people so afraid of dieing by going out doors that they'll do anything the government says to survive.
"That's what you get when you wage war on Christmas, America."
America invented Christmas, I think that gives them the right to attack it.
Fact: (I'm fairly sure, but feel free to correct me)
Christmas as a gift-giving tradition was created as a marketting ploy roughly around 1900. "Santa" was derived from the Danish equivilent who wore green, and he wears a red suit because Coka Cola sponsered his hat and so the rest of the suit was made red too.
Borg:"Lawsuits are irrelevant. GPL3 is irrelevant. DRM is good. We understand security... Alert! MS are assimilating us!
Having just written two term papers analyzing the social construction of the bird flu, I'm loaded with more H5N1 knowledge than I ever thought possible. Part of the problem is that Tamiflu isn't designed to fight the bird flu, it's not a vaccine, it's an anti-viral (and, up until the end of 2004, it was one of Roche's least successful drugs). It operates by reducing the spread of a virus within the body, alleviating the severity of the effects of normal flu strains in humans by up to 38%, and reducing the time of infection by up to two days. It does NOT cure/prevent bird flu, but it is believed that it might be effective in lesseing the communicability of the disease. There are other anti-virals, such as GlaxoSmithKline's Relenza, that should have roughly equal effectiveness. BUT, guess what? The creator/patent-holder of Tamiflu is Gilead Sciences Inc; a company whose CEO from 1997-2001 was none other than Donald Rumsfeld. The wife of former California Gov. Pete Wilson is on the board, as well as George Schultz (US Sec of State from '82 - '89). These political connections might be a key reason why the Bush Administration hasn't invoked the WHO's TRIPS Agreement, which allows for compulsory licensing (in which, in the face of a potential health crisis, the patent on a drug is broken, allowing other companies to produce the drug, while a modest licensing fee is paid to the patent holder), and would actually allow the US to stockpile enough of the drug to make a serious impact (WHO recommends that a country have enough anti-virals to treat 25% of its population, given the current productive capacities of Roche, the US won't have that amount until around 2011). In light of the recent discovery that the 1918 flu outbreak was, in fact, a strain of the bird flu that had mutated amongst bird populations until developing in a strain that was capable of human-to-human transmission, scientists DO have a genome sequence of one such iteration of the virus, which could be used to develop vaccines (that may or may not work). Most health officials agree, however, that spending money on drug stockpiling is an empty gesture, and that available treatments should be sent instead to the poor East Asian countries where an outbreak is most likely to occur (and who can least afford to pay for the drugs). Even then, the drugs are not recommended as a primary means of prevention, rather, improvement in monitoring/reporting infrastructures, as well as new medical technology, is the suggested course of action. I could go on, but suffice it to say, it's not surprising to hear about Tamiflu's lack of effectiveness, and were it not for the fact that the "BIRD FLU PANDEMICPALOOZA" were just a big political opportunity for the Bush Administration to assert themselves as competent and forward-thinking after the Katrina tragedy and the recent drop in US public support for the Iraqi War, that is, if the Bushies REALLY wanted to fight the flu and not just use it as a means of gaining some good PR while lining the pockets of their friends, then Tamiflu would almost never be mentioned in the press. End Rant.
http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.ht ml?uc_full_date=20051218
I'm fairly paranoid and all that about things. But a birdie flu is not something that bothers me less than people being bothered by it.
From the bird flu FAQ, around 200 people have died from it, and it was compared to the last plague, SARS, to the 800. How about this silly question? "Can avian flu be passed from person to person? There are indications that it can, although so far not in the form which could fuel a pandemic." Or this? "Does this mean there is likely to be a large outbreak of bird flu? Experts are concerned that this could happen. But in the Thai case, the virus was only passed to close relatives and spread no further." Or this? "What would be the consequence if this did happen? Once the virus gained the ability to pass easily between humans the results could be catastrophic. Worldwide, experts predict anything between two million and 50 million deaths."
So the worst case guestimate is that 0.7% of the population might die. Lets compare that to real data. The population appears to be growing. And, over the past month, on average 6 million people are net gained on this planet. And this growth is estimated to continue at the same rate until July, 2006.
So, if everybody forgets to die and fuck for 8 months its the same thing as the worst case scenario from something that may not be contracted from person to person.
Be scared, very scared.
Wake me up when a good plague comes though. I remember when they would wipe out 1/3 of the population, and we would be grateful, and life went on without laws protecting drug companies from being sued for potentially killing people who make drugs to keep stuff like this from hurting us. Now that, my friends is something to be worried about.
I for one welcome our newly resistant Bird Virus Saviors.... who will one day defeat our future Martian Overlords!
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Christmas as a gift-giving tradition was created as a marketting ploy roughly around 1900.
Utterly ridiculous. The tradition of giving gifts at Christmas is as old as Christianity itself. Roman accounts of Christmas celebrations include exchanges of gifts amoung relatives.
There is no doubt that Tamiflu is preferred for politcal reasons.
The ONLY way that Tamiflu will lose the government contracts is if Haliburton comes out with a vaccine of their own.
Lose Weight and Feel Great with Isagenix
"he wears a red suit because Coka Cola sponsered his hat and so the rest of the suit was made red too."
This is false.
http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/santa.asp
Here are the current physician points of interest being batted about on this topic:
Avian Flu Deaths Linked to Tamiflu Resistance:
Two patients from Vietnam, 18 and 13, that died to to compications from avian influenza were recently shown to harbor oseltamivir (Tamiflu) resistant strains fo the virus. The 13 year old female was give 75mg doses at the first symptoms of the infections, keeping the virus in check for approx. 3 days. She succumbed several days later. The 18 year old was given a full 14 day treatment with oseltamivir, died, and replicating virus was still isolated from her.
As a side not to all of this, the other drug is Relenza (zanamivir). It is great, with one downside. Currenty prearation is inhalation delivery. Which means if you are in respiratory distress, say like you have bird flu, or ARDS or similar, the delivery method is not the best.
(Via New England Journal of Medicine De Jong MD et al. Oseltamivir Resistance during Treatment of Influenza A (H5N1) Infection. N Engl J Med 2005;353:2667-72. .)
Argh. The laws of science be a harsh mistress.
I have RTFA and determined that there is no way such resistance could have simply evolved - to have done so would be like a tornado going through a junk yard and a 747 being the result. Therefore I must conclude that the new resistance of the Avian Flu virus was intelligently inserted, i.e., designed, much the way God designed our eyes, tonsils, and (most thoughtfully of all) our precious wisdom teeth
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
See Bird Flu Drug Rendered Useless for how China fucked the rest of the world by misusing a human antiviral drug on chickens.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
You mean like when it arrives in Siberia, where birds migrate to Canada, and then to the U.S.?
Granted the strain in Canada was confirmed to be low risk, but the trend of migrating birds spreading the virus is still a serious matter, especially when each strain constantly mutates as it comes in contact with different species already infected with different viruses.
Lose Weight and Feel Great with Isagenix
The "stuff" is actually viral proteins extracted from a dead virus. Ignoring the fact that it's an inefficient and not particularly successful method of inducing immunity in the first place, you're right - using eggs to make large quantities of H5N1 is impossible.
The way to do it would be using a recombinant vaccine.
Is it Evolution or Intelligent Design
http://birdflu.boardtracker.com/
Should be good for a bit of xmas shopping!
One Excellent point there. We are currently steeped in anti-science and pseudo-science scare tactics. Anybody with basic biology can tell you organisms don't develop a resistance to an agent unless they are exposed to it. If we had been using this drug on a huge scale already against 'bird flu', perhaps treating 2 or 3 million patients over a significant timescale then the issue of resistance might be valid. There would have been enough iterations to produce a selection based on mutation. But we haven't. Last I heard there were about 500 cases of human form flu reported in China, that's it.
So where do these figures come from? Lets see the data. There's something odd about this whole predictive media bandwagon. Epidemics are not something we see coming, they happen and we respond best we can. There are thousands of other deadly diseases out there that *might* mutate into a deadly human form, so why don't we also focus on them and take premptive measures. The way this whole thing is being constantly talked up makes me suspicious as a scientist, I think I don't need to add any more.
Not only is Christmas gift giving as old as Christmas itself, it's older! Io, Saturnalia!
I would not be surprised to find out that pretty much all the virus and infectious bacterial agents in nature tend to build up resistance to the various drugs that are used to combat them.
I haven't read through all the comments, so someone's likely to have already said this but,
The best thing for people to do with regards to their health is build up their immune system without drugs. Eat more foods with anti-viral, and anti-bacterial properties.
Garlic's a good one, all round. Peppers - capsicum, chili - are good too, and can add a nice little kick to an otherwise mild tasting meal. Having fish? Add lemon juice, or orange for a slightly sweeter taste. Salad? Add some shallots or onions.
I think the biggest problem though with the enhanced diet approach is that too many people cook their food too much.
I will happily nibble on raw onion, raw garlic, shallots, a capsicum, chili. I may not be very approachable if I'm breathing in your direction, but I wouldn't be approachable if I was sick either.
Boost your immune system, don't rely on the drugs. What happens when you catch a new strain of something that there is no drug to combat it with? Don't just eat healthy, eat health-enhancing foods, and your body will still catch things, but it'll be a lot more ready to fight them.
I don't get very sick these days, but when I do - even if it's a really bad cold or flu that's knocking people about here and there, and there's warnings about it on the news, fairly common around here during the winter months - I tend to get better within fourty-eight hours.
I've caught things that have had friends and family in bed for days, taking drugs prescribed by a doctor and complaining about how crap they feel, and while they do that, I'm seriously chowing down on various strong foods, making myself sweat and do a lot of physical exertion, and keeping myself hot and active, flushing myself through with lots of water and hot soups.
It's simple, but it tends to work. The strongest drugs I take these days are aspirin if I get a migraine, and no, I'm not one of these anti-drug guys. I smoke, which I know doesn't help normally, and I like to drink alcohol, I just don't like to try and combat every little ailment I have with drugs, and my body tends to resist communicable illnesses that people around me have got.
Eat healthy, and you'll be healthy. Eat health-boosting foods, and you'll tend to gain resistance to little nasties.
His name is Robert Paulsen...
Keep the X in Xmas. And, always spell it Xian, not Christian. The 'X' character here is not an 'ex', it's a 'chi'. Real Christians will know what that means. People who think that Xmas is not Christian are obviously not real Christians.
That was the opening shot in the war against Christmas. The forces of Xmas will be victorious. Now your head can asplode. Thank you.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Get with the program. Researches have been saying for weeks that Tamiflu is ineffective, totally. It has nothing to do with "bird flu" developing resistance.
Just because someone died from bird flu after taking tammiflu doesn't necessarily mean that it's developing a resistance to the drug.
First off, the "bird flu" doesn't transfer from human to human yet. In order for it to "develop a resistance" it's got to be able to go somewhere once this so called resistance has developed. Well, this can't exactly happen since it can't be transferred from human to human yet.
Secondly, the article reports that the people given tammiflu did get better first. This doesn't necessarily mean the virus is has developed a resistance to the drug. There's also the possibility that they weren't given enough tammiflu. Sure it helped for a little bit, but after 3 days it wore off. Maybe this virus is strong enough to require multiple or higher doses of tammiflu than a normal flu virus.
Call me when there's real news to report.
In fact, as I think about it, I would guess it's a matter of when, not if, all transportation will be shut down. If not for this disease, then another like it. If not now, then in a few years.
The solution is to have a year's supply of food and water in your house. Start now. Start out by getting 3 days' worth of food and water (don't forget the first aid kit), and go on from there. For a teensy bit of extra money every month, you can have a stockpile of food before you know it.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
Why noone is thinking about that?
The problem with the avian flu is that the body react in a fercious way.
So the solution is to weaken our immunitary system for a while.
Maybe not too much.
Hey... We can stop the spread of AIDS if people stoped having sex or used protection. Too bad the bird flu isn't spread by sex with birds.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
Birds will be the death of us.
Slashdot = -1 Redundant, Asperger, kdawson FUD, Libertarian, and Linux
There's a case made that the practice of wassailing was intentionally shifted from the practice of charitable gift-giving to drunken adult Christmas revelers to instead gift children, reinforcing a victorian stereotype of "worthy" poor, of which Tiny Tim is an archetypical:
While that's a bit of a reach, it's fairly well agreed that the practice of gift giving at Christmas was certainly not as popular as it is today:
So the weight of evidence as Christmas gift giving (as we think of it) being a recent invention is on the original poster's side.
You're right about spending a lot of money on oseltamivir being a bit of a waste. Your ideas, while fine from a lab point of view, are not possible in the 'real world', which is why public health people/ epidemiologists generally run the show in this kind of event, not lab people like your girlfriend, or clinicians (like me), although I am on a committee of 20 planning for pandemic influenza covering about 1m people.
Part of the problem with the purchase of oseltamivir from a political point of view is that it is necessary to be seen to be doing something, and the snake oil salesmen are only too happy to try to cash in, as you rightly point out.
Unfortunately you cannot build a vaccine straight away, and all the work being done now may not pay off. In addition to the research component, there are also major manufacturing problems, as most countries will nationalise existing vaccine production facilities.
This means if you are in a poor country, forget about vaccine. America is relatively underprovided but is building facilities - I think. Europe is OK, and I think Japan and Australia/NZ will be OK. Just storing and distributing the vaccine will be a nightmare. We are planning armed guards, military storage depots etc. as the potential for theft/ fraud/ corruption and general unhappiness is large.
The bad news for geeks is that it is the under 30s who will probably have the highest mortality: a sobering account from the 1918 flu pandemic in this week's British Medical Journal. On the other hand, if you survive, there will be plenty of job opportunities...
Humorous signatures are over-rated.
See this, for example, for a quite an interesting analysis of how disease affected history. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385121229/103-89 20737-8104634?v=glance&n=283155
"Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead." A. Huxley
60% off current fried chicken if they keep killing chicken
The reason for the concern about Tamiflu resistance (as opposed to resistance to Relenza) is that Tamiflu can prevent infection by non-resistant influenza. Hence public health officials were hoping to use it to stop the spread of an epidemic of human-to-human mutated bird flu by giving it to those who might have been exposed or would soon be exposed, thus isolating the mutated flu and letting it die out. This is similar to the approach of "ring vaccination" used to stop smallpox (except that here there is no adequate vaccine).
It is also obvious, upon reflection, but needs to be born in mind that if an instance of mutation into human transmissible disease occurs, it initally only infects one person. If that infection can be contained, that instance of the mutation might be snuffed out. The success of that strategy also, of course, depends on whether the mutation has made its way into the animal - specifically migratory bird - population.
Finally, I suspect that the existence of resistant H5N1 means that some poultry growers in Asia, probablhy Vietnam, have been giving Tamiflu to their birds.
The only good weather is bad weather.
Well, we all know that it isn't really the viruses and bacteria from that region that we have to worry about, but miniaturized Chinese People.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
I remembered having read somewhere about Rumsfeld being involved as a shareholder of Roche. Did a quick Google and found (amongst others) this: http://www.currentconcerns.ch/archive/2005/06/2005 0602.php . Interesting, isn't it?
What person will donate an airborne act of love?
The problem is that at one point there may be a "protein envelope" that the immune system cannot match up to, in which case resistance is not just futile - its impossible. Think of a new flu that the body can't manufacture a "key" to fit into the protein coat of the virus - a vaccine won't help.
And this hasn't shown up in the billions of years viruses have been around? The reverse could be true as well. A cell wall with no protein 'ports' for a virus to latch on to.
Realistically speaking, a virus has to have a protein coat, has to have a method of attaching to the very cells that it has evolved to attack. This leaves it vulnerable.
As for the immune system being unable to match up, well, the owning organism dies in that instance.
I don't read AC A human right
From my understanding the "girlfriend" poster's proposal is two stages, and other than the lack of a profit angle I can't see anything wrong with it.
;)
The first stage would invovle developing a vaccine for the domestic bird population. Relatively easy to do since they have simpler biologies than us, and there are several hundred (easy) surviving bird-flu avians that can be pooled for an immunology database. Then it is a relatively simple matter of finding the particular marker sequence that is responsible for the immunity (hence the requirement of several hundred subject making it easy: process of elimination within a larger pool results in fewer possible candidates). Use of this accine for mass domestic bird populations (chicken farms and so on) reduces the number of "incubators" for human/bird species jump of the bird-flu. This would give us TIME for stage 2.
Stage 2 invovles the construction of several SMALL (at lest that is my impression) facilities for the production of the human/bird-flu vaccine, using the methods discovered for the regular avian version of the bird-flu. Once an full-on outbreak occurs it really IS a simple matter of biological cut/paste like was described. The same procedure happens every year for the asiatic flu. You take the new virus and compare it to the old virus, the difference in cell protien attachments is the difference that makes it human-compatible. Then you take your existing vaccine, and alter it to have the same protien attachment. The result is a vaccine that is effective agaisnt the new version of the old bug. The HARD part come in manufacture and distribution, but with a lab capable of cranking out a few million doses in a couple days located next to every major urban population center...
If anything, given this plan, I would think that construction worker's unions would be SCREAMING for it. After all, it entails one of the largest contruction projects in the USA since the interstate highway system... so maybe there IS a profit angle after all
In addition to what other readers have said, I want to add that developing a vaccine isn't realized over night.
And also, in fighting a disease, every weapon you could use need to be considered (and maybe used if the cost/benefits ratio is interesting). Once used at scale of whole population, nothing is 100% efficient. There's very seldom a one-solution-fits-all. You always need to have as much alternative as possible.
So yes. In *theory* the vaccine is the best way to go. But in the meantime, in the real world, we must have something until good and efficient vaccine is ready, and we must have drugs to either combat or (in Tamiflu's case) reduce strength of disease to take care of people who'll catch the flu anyway (because vaccine isn't 100% efficient, because people haven't got vaccine yet, because some people are against vaccines, because the year after the virus will mutate its surface proteins...).
But on the other hand Stock-piling drugs at home is *very dumb*, because without proper diagnosis, the people are very likely to use the drugs in an inappropriate way/moment, and end up *favoring* the creation of new drug-resistant mutants. And the government stockpiling it is just some way to show in the media and pretend they do something important for the new disease, because the people want them to.
(BTW: I happen to *both* have graduated in medicine and have worked in a research lab specializing with antibiotics resistant bacteria.
Have maybe some insights in clinical reality that your indirect information lacks...)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Recombination is cut'n'pasting piece of DNA around.
One, very-high tech, way to produce vaccines other than "grow it on some host medium"
is to analyze the virus' DNA, find which gene code for the proteins that the anti-bodies react to (hoping that : there are such proteins that can generate immunity per se, ex.: if you inject them purified. And those proteins should depend only on known gene, no yet unknown post-processing [sugar appending] should be needed), create artificial plasmid with said gene, inject gene into yeast, let yeast grow in huge tanks, harvest and purify protein from tanks, use that as component of your vaccine.
Won't work if :
- only inactivated virus are good immunogens and no proteins that works by itself alone is found yet.
- some post-processing happens to the protein (adding sugars) and this particular processus is not known yet (unable to add the needed genes to the plasmid and obtain proteins that cause antibodies cross-reacting with the real bug).
And besides :
- It's much more high-tech and costly to do. Good for some disease that are constant (almost no mutation. 1 protein found and works for ever) and for disease whose inactivated-virus counterparts have problems (purified proteins from cell cultures and recombinant viruses cannot make one sick of the same disease. Virus made less virulent *could* make one sick on some *very rare* occasion, like lessvirulent-live-virus polio vaccine)
- It's bad for virus that mutate a lot (like the flu) : by the time you manage to develop something a new wave has come (it's easyer to slap the virus on some eggs, extract and purify the minimum you need to generate antibodies. No need to loose time to understand *what* is the structure of the protein in your mix that does the trick)
- The influenza virus is a genetic mess. It's made up of several separate pieces of genetic material (compare to our chromosomes) and those pieces can very easily be shuffled between different mutants that have infected the same cell (compare to we having sex), that's why the bird-flu could really easily mix with human-flu and give rise to a H5N1 capable of human-to-human transmission.
As far as I know this technique is used for some vaccine against Hepatitis viruses (A & B).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
People can read Childrens BBC to find out that Tamiflu just gives your body a bit of a time window to help it build up its defense - so quoting any specialisation or authority in an argument like this is redundant.
That is like me saying: My uncle is Neil Armstrong and he said that the moon isn't really made of cheese, he should know!
Although in that instance the anecdote has value enough that it merits the mention.
He isn't really my uncle. Second cousin.
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