Pandemic Influenza

(CIDRAP News) – A study from the University of Iowa suggests that veterinarians who work with poultry have a significantly higher risk of infection with avian influenza, compared with nonveterinarians.

– TORONTO (CIDRAP News) – Declining public interest in the deadly H5N1 strain of avian influenza and its pandemic potential has sparked alarm among animal-health experts, who worry that shifting priorities will derail the funding still needed to control the disease in birds.

– 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.

– TORONTO (CIDRAP News) – Ten years after H5N1 avian influenza first began to raise fears of a potential pandemic, the world has a stronger set of tools to contain that virus and similar threats, but also a fresh awareness of humanity's vulnerability to fast-spreading diseases, experts said yesterday at an international conference on flu.

(CIDRAP News) – A hundred leaders from the business, healthcare, faith, and civic communities met with US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) officials yesterday to discuss how to motivate individuals and families to prepare for an influenza pandemic.

(CIDRAP News) – GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) promised today to give 50 million doses of its H5N1 "prepandemic" influenza vaccine to the World Health Organization (WHO) for distribution to poor countries.

The vaccine will be delivered over 3 years and be enough to vaccinate 25 million people at two doses each, the United Kingdom–based drug company said in a news release.

(CIDRAP News) – The European Union (EU) has approved Novartis's seasonal influenza vaccine, Optaflu, putting the Swiss company in a position to become the first to market a flu vaccine grown in cell culture rather than eggs.

(CIDRAP News) – Antibodies gleaned from four Vietnamese patients who survived H5N1 avian influenza were used successfully to prevent and treat H5N1 infection in mice, suggesting that the same approach might be useful in humans, according to a recent report by an international team of researchers.

(CIDRAP News) – Fewer than half of physicians who responded to a survey at a recent conference in Europe said they thought an influenza pandemic was very likely in the next few years, according to a report in the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood.

(CIDRAP News) – Farmers, airlines, and salmon fishermen stood to benefit when Congress passed a modestly trimmed emergency spending bill yesterday, but pandemic influenza preparedness lost out.