News & Perspective

(CIDRAP News) – During the second day of the World Health Assembly (WHA), Microsoft chairman Bill Gates urged delegates to commit their leadership and resources to vaccines, and members heard updates on radiation issues in Japan and plans for World Health Organization (WHO) reforms.

The 64th session of the WHO opened in Geneva yesterday and meets through May 24. The WHA, the WHO's decision-making group, is made up of delegates from 193 countries.

(CIDRAP News) – Sanofi Pasteur pledged today to give 60 million doses of H5N1 influenza vaccine over 3 years to the World Health Organization (WHO) for a planned stockpile to help poor countries in the event of an influenza pandemic.

(CIDRAP News) – A year after the World Health Organization (WHO) called for the development of an international stockpile of vaccines against H5N1 influenza, the stockpile has not yet materialized, the WHO said in a report released today.

(CIDRAP News) – An Indonesian health official, responding to recent comments by the US health secretary, today denied that Indonesia wants financial compensation if it resumes sharing its H5N1 avian influenza virus samples.

Maryn McKennaContributing Writer

(CIDRAP News) – This in-depth article investigates the prospects for development of vaccines to head off the threat of an influenza pandemic posed by the H5N1 avian influenza virus. Its seven parts put advances in vaccine technology in perspective by illuminating the formidable barriers to producing an effective and widely usable vaccine in a short time frame.

– TORONTO (CIDRAP News) – The continuing debate over developing countries' ability to afford pandemic-influenza vaccines has produced a disturbing complication: the possibility that Indonesia and other countries affected by H5N1 avian flu will assert legal ownership of the viral isolates on which the vaccines would be based.

(CIDRAP News) – As expected, the World Health Organization (WHO) approved a resolution on the sharing of influenza viruses and access to pandemic vaccines just before adjourning its annual meeting of member countries today.