medicalcondition:bird flu

  • Canada not planning H7N9 bird flu vaccine studies | CTV News
    http://www.ctvnews.ca/health/canada-not-planning-h7n9-bird-flu-vaccine-studies-1.1275232

    Sous ce titre se cache un intéressant développement sur l’inefficacité complète des vaccins contre les souches H7 du virus de la grippe (et donc, très probablement, d’un éventuel vaccin pour H7N9). D’où la nécessité de produire ce futur vaccin avec un #adjuvant, ce qui n’est pas le cas à ce jour des vaccins états-uniens contre la grippe.

    Canada currently has no plans to ask its pandemic flu vaccine manufacturers to make trial batches of vaccine to protect against the new H7N9 bird flu, senior officials of the Public Health Agency of Canada have revealed.
    While the U.S. government has said it will ask several of flu vaccine manufacturers to start growing up batches of serum against the new virus this summer, Canada will watch, wait and learn from the work the U.S. does, the officials said in an interview with The Canadian Press.
    “What we need to do in the international research-scientific community, the public health community is to complement each other. If the U.S. is doing something, we don’t need to do it necessarily,” explained Dr. Frank Plummer, head of the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg.

    Dr. John Spika, director general of the public health agency’s center for immunization and respiratory infectious diseases, said doing this early work is more crucial for the United States, which will have to make a decision about whether to use an adjuvant with H7N9 vaccine, if the virus causes a pandemic. An adjuvant is a product that boosts the immune response to a vaccine, typically allowing a smaller dose to have a protective effect.

  • On travaille d’arrache-pied sur le séquençage du nouveau virus.

    UPDATE 4-China mobilises to fight new bird flu ; Japan, HK on guard | Reuters
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/04/health-birdflu-china-idUSL3N0CR0J320130404

    So far, this lack of human-to-human transmission also appears to be a feature of the H7N9 strain.

    However, China has yet to find any animals infected with #H7N9, meaning how humans got it remains a mystery.

    “The gene sequences confirm that this is an avian virus, and that it is a low pathogenic form (meaning it is likely to cause mild disease in birds),” said Wendy Barclay, a flu virologist at Britain’s Imperial College London.

    “But what the sequences also reveal is that there are some mammalian adapting mutations in some of the genes.”

    This, she said, meant the H7N9 virus has already acquired some of the genetic changes it would need to mutate into a form that could be transmitted from person to person.

    Le Japon commence à sensibiliser les passagers aux aéroports…

    In Japan, airports have put up posters at entry points warning all airline passengers from China to seek medical attention if they suspect they have bird flu.

    … et Hong-Kong aussi :

    All passengers on flights in and out of Hong Kong were being asked to notify flight attendants or airport staff if they were feeling unwell.

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