Slashdot Mirror
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."
No need to worry about bird flu any more, just the incipient WWIII brewing in the Middle East...
As the comment on the pages says... is this for the birds or humans ?
Cruise TT
Now they just have to worry about patents and the costs of the vaccine and deployment. After all, now that there is a vaccine, any capitalist-minded people would think, "Hey! Let their chickens die out! We'll have a monopoly on chickens!"
Are we to believe that they'll just give it out to the world?
There's already a vaccine for H5N1; all this article is saying is that now an Indian lab has produced one as well, so they don't have to import it.
Great editing, as usual.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
It is described as an indigineous replacement for something they can already import. It sounds as if it's just for birds.
And you hardly can inoculate all the poultry in a country. So the significance of this seems pretty limited.
Dang. I had my hopes way up from reading the headline.
To err is human. To forgive is good system design.
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.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
that this vaccine is for birds and not humans. The vaccine will prevent avian to human transmission, but will be useless if H5N1, the avian flu virus mutates into human infective form.
Legally obligatory sig : My opinions are my own... etc etc
Whatever vaccine they made today is not going to be greatly effective when a bird flu mutates and becomes transmittable from person-to-person.
I suggest you read Slashdot
Was the 42nd victim a troublemaker?
I just finished my underground shelter yesterday. It had food, cable internet, food, cable and sat TV, food, PS2, food, games, food, a bed, food, etc. I ordered a special computer. What shall I do with all these preps...
I guess I could just seclude myself, eat, sit at the computer, play games, watch TV. Actually, nothing has changed.
didn't you get that memo?
Until we know how well it works - and I can't find any information linked to today's news - it's too soon to say "one less thing to worry about."
BTW: Didn't Hungarian Scientists do this in 2005? "Hungary's health minister says a bird flu vaccine appears to be effective in early tests. The vaccine works against H5N1 Hungary's health minister says a bird flu vaccine appears to be effective in early tests. The trial jab appears to protect humans and animals against the lethal H5N1 virus, preliminary results show." - BBC 19 October 2005
Reduce, reuse, cycle
US Pharmas have developed a suite of drugs to control the symptoms of the flu. They immediately opened talks with both Congress and the administration to pressure India to prevent deployment of their vaccine. "Implementation of the Indian solution would not be in the best interests of the US or the world," said a Pharma spokesperson.
Is there a +5 Cynical?
I don't know which choir you think you're preaching to, but it is not the majority of the Slashdot crowd.
Many of us may not agree with the current implementation of some IP protections (software patents especially), but I think there are very few of us that would be for the abolishment of IP enforcement. If you truely think about it, it is only with IP enforcment that software licenses such as the GPL can work. Without IP rights, anyone would be able to take all of the GPL licensed code and integrate it into closed source applications without any contribution back to the community. Only through IP enforcement can we prevent the "embrace and extend" philosopy that leads to proprietarity.
Official Press Release at: http://www.icar.org.in/pr/16072006.htm
Never ascribe to malice what can be adequately attributed to ignorance. -Napoleon
The article above is missing the specifics, so try this one:e ctid=4&articleid=7162006205183757162006204743859
http://www.mumbaimirror.com/nmirror/mmpaper.asp?s
"The vaccine will be injected into birds to prevent them from getting infected, he said.
A government statement said it was a homologous vaccine derived from the H5N1 strain."
The point of it is to stop it in birds, so it can't get on to humans I imagine.
But what ever are Fox, CNN, and the Bush administration going to use to distract us now? It's been such an integral part of their claim that the sky is falling and that we should therefore hand over all our freedoms. Does this mean double helpings of immigrant phobia? Would have to be, since if they whip up North Korea or Iran, they'd actually have to do something about it.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.