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...
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.
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?
It's for humans. The Avian flu is not a serious things for birds. Think of it this way, a cold is shitty, granted, but it won't destroy your life. In very rare cases will a cold last longer than a week and a half, and even rarer for it to have a permanent effect. But if...a dog, somehow someway contracted a common cold, and was completely unprepared to accept the virus and combat it, the dog would die without much of a fight. Monkeys live with AIDS like it's nothing, but it destroys us. The Avian flu is a bird disease, and when cross-genus diseases spread, there's (as far as we know) no way to stop almost certain death. Yay for vaccines!
I Bleed Scarlet
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
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