News & Perspective

(CIDRAP News) – New reports of H7N9 avian influenza cases from eastern China continued at a steady pace today, with five more infections and one death confirmed by officials in Shanghai and Jiangsu province.

(CIDRAP News) – A year-long voluntary moratorium on research involving transmissible H5N1 avian flu viruses ended today with a letter from a group of scientists that supports resuming the work in countries that have addressed the biosafety issues involved.

(CIDRAP News) – Officials from the World Health Organization (WHO) and a vaccine-maker trade group at a public hearing today defended themselves against allegations from some European politicians that they exaggerated the H1N1 pandemic threat to benefit drug companies.

(CIDRAP News) – In the history of infectious diseases, coincidence plays an extraordinary role. In 1706, Cotton Mather purchased a slave named Onesimus who happened to come from a tribe that practiced variolation, and so smallpox prevention was introduced to North America.

(CIDRAP News) – China's State Food and Drug Administration (SFDA) yesterday approved the country's first prepandemic H5N1 influenza vaccine, an inactivated whole-virus product made by Sinovac, a Beijing-based biotechnology company.

(CIDRAP News) – Reports of suspected human H5N1avian influenza cases among brothers in Pakistan are raising fresh fears in the global health community of human-to-human transmission of the virus, amid uncertainty about how a father-son pair in China contracted their H5N1 infections.

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.