Concern that bird flu vaccine may be too late

Main Category: Bird Flu / Avian Flu
Also Included In: Flu / Cold / SARS
Article Date: 19 Jan 2004 - 0:00 PDT

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There is concern that the international medical community will not be able to deliver enough doses of an effective vaccine in time (if bird flu is passed on to humans).

Bird Flu is spreading on chicken farms throughout many parts of Asia.

A researcher says that the main problem is that most of the patents (that matter for the production of an effective vaccine) are held separately by many different venture businesses around the globe.

The problems have already been pointed out in a study on ways to deal with a new strain of influenza that was jointly compiled last year by a group of infectious disease experts.

With regard to bird flu strain A, also known as H5N1, research institutes, including the National Institute of Infectious Diseases, began researching a new vaccine after the bird flu killed people in Hong Kong in 1997, the researcher said.

Those efforts have already produced prospects for developing a new vaccine for H5N1, either by finding in wild animals a virus of the same type, but less virulent than the one that spreads through human contact with an infected animal, or by attenuating the virulence of H5N1.

It has been learned, however, that the patent rights for most of the genetic engineering technologies used to attenuate the virus and those for the production processes are held by several venture businesses, chiefly in the United States.

In order to use these technologies to produce the vaccine commercially, it would be necessary to negotiate with the patent holders and to pay royalties.

The World Health Organization, which takes the bird flu outbreak very seriously, has begun negotiations with these businesses, but has so far had little success, the researcher said.

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