Indian Scientists Develop Vaccine for Bird Flu

William Robinson writes "Indian Scientists have succeeded in developing a vaccine against the bird flu disease that has affected poultry business in many parts of the world. This was formally announced, and ICAR Director-General Mangala Rai described this as a big step forward in tackling the highly pathogenic avian influenza, commonly called the bird flu. Indonesia, who has recently reported their 42nd victim of bird flu, will now have one less thing to worry about."

Comments

Over-stating the case

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Let's not jump the gun here. The big threat to humans is a mutated strain of something like H5N1 that does the damage of the original bird flu but spreads through humans as fast as a human flu. Developing a vaccine for this threat requires knowing what the threat is, and as yet, there have been no confirmed cases of human-human transmission.

Even with recent advances, developing and mass-producing vaccines takes several weeks, by which time the vaccine will be irrelevant for many people if the mutated strain starts to spread. This is the nightmare scenario, and is why so much research is currently being done into improving vaccine development, and so much planning focusses on identifying human-human transmission as early as possible.

Of course anything to reduce the spread of the original bird flu also reduces the opportunity for a mutated strain to develop, and is therefore a good thing. But let's not misunderstand what's been achieved here.

Re:Did you even read the article?

[Halo1]

From the article:

Rai informed the meeting that a comprehensive draft report had been submitted to an ICAR committee to develop guidelines for intellectual property management and commercialisation of technologies in the national agricultural system under the ICAR.

Your comment reminds me of the large US hi-tech companies accusing the Chinese of "stealing their IP" and then getting caught with their pants down when it turns out they were not delivering the "IP" they promised in their contracts.

The "all the Chinese, Indians and other Asians can do is copy our great Western inventions" story is getting old very quickly, and more untrue every day. It would surprise me if they don't soon overtake the Western companies concerning the amount of awarded patents and things like that.

Glass half empty and full

[Hao Wu]

Developing a vaccine was never the problem, rather making it FAST enough in sufficient quantities in the event of a pandemic. There is no guessing the genetic sequence of the virus before then, and basically a year of production is required after when ever it appears. Not before.

Whatever vaccine they made today is not going to be greatly effective when a bird flu mutates and becomes transmittable from person-to-person.