Scientists one step closer to universal flu vaccine (click title to entry - thank you)

Pandemic vaccines: promises and pitfalls (click here)

Robert Booy, Lorena E Brown, Gary S Grohmann and C Raina MacIntyre

...Researchers at Scripps Research Institute  in la Jolla, California, teamed up with Peter Palese and colleagues at Mount Sinai Medical School in New York to test a protein that works against viruses from every flu family that attacks people.

These included three pandemic viruses (H1, H2 and H3), three others that attack occasionally (H6, H9 and H7), and the H5N1 bird flu from 2004 - albeit modified to make it less deadly.

Mice were injected with this protein twice, three weeks apart, to allow their immunity to develop. Two weeks after the second injection each mouse was exposed to one type of live flu virus, as were unvaccinated mice, reports New Scientist....

Will a common protein eventually be the end of viral deaths?

...Flu can kill in other ways, too, (click here) from rendering you vulnerable to bacterial infections to triggering heart attacks. Of course, most flu strains, including (so far) the 2009 pandemic virus, cause only mild symptoms in the vast majority of people. But with 10 to 20 per cent of people worldwide getting flu every year, that still adds up to a huge burden of illness - and even in a good year some half a million die....

Mind your H’s and N’s: How is the flu named and what can it mean for who’s at risk? (click here)

by Sarah V. White
Oct 21, 2010

...The most significant proteins, hemagglutinin and neuraminidase, direct the flu naming system, she said.   

“Flu viruses are typed based on these surface proteins,” Strek said.  “H1N1, for example, expresses hemagglutinin 1 and neuraminidase 1.”...



Thursday 21 October 2010

Bird flu education brings mixed results  (click here)

Training scheme shows signs of success, but risky habits prove hard to quash in cities 

People who witness avian flu outbreaks in animals near them fear the disease less than those with no experience of it, and this may affect their exposure to poultry, according to a review of education campaigns for backyard farmers in Laos.

“We report a paradoxical relationship between unsafe behaviours and risk perception in urban areas,” write Hubert Barennes of the French speaking Institute for Tropical Medicine in Vientiane, Laos, and colleagues.

The findings, published online this week in BMC Infectious Diseases, also suggest that some important risk messages get forgotten. “Washing hands and other hygiene advice, messages given during the highly pathogenic avian influenza educational campaign, were not recalled.”...

...A disease (click here) that might have been highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) killed poultry across much of the United States in 1872 and closely followed a nationwide outbreak of influenza in horses, according to a historical analysis by researchers from the National Institutes of Health....