Word: h5n1
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...there any genetic changes in the virus? The H5N1 virus has undergone significant genetic changes over the past several years, but there's no evidence so far of a specific change that makes the virus more transmissible to humans...
...race to develop a vaccine for bird flu, Vietnam has been a dark horse with early success. Vietnamese scientists have produced a prototype vaccine for the H5N1 avian-influenza strain and are planning human testing in August?just a few months behind top researchers in the U.S. There's good reason for the haste: 70% of the world's bird-flu deaths in the last two years occurred in Vietnam, and the government worries that the country could someday be ground zero of a pandemic if the flu mutates to become easily transferred among humans...
...World Health Organization (WHO) and other scientists are worried about Vietnam's vaccine, which they say could itself make people sick, or even set off a pandemic. The problem is that the virus reference seed?the weakened bit of live H5N1 used to build up immunity in the human body?was mixed with cancer cells to help it replicate and then grown in a monkey kidney. That method is highly unorthodox. "People could get cancer from the vaccine," says Klaus Stohr, head of the WHO's global influenza program. Even more ominous, the developers say they've followed international procedures...
...next few years. It has a moral obligation to its own people, and to the world, to rectify the situation as soon as possible." DR. DAVID HO, U.S. aids researcher, warning in an article in the medical journal Nature that China is dangerously unprepared for an outbreak of the h5n1 virus...
...virulence, but the human death rate in hard-hit northern Vietnam has fallen to 34% this year, down from almost 80% for the entire country in 2004. Good news? Not if you're an epidemiologist. Investigators for the World Health Organization (WHO) have raised concerns that even though the H5N1 bird-flu virus appears to be weakening, it may be adapting better to human beings?potentially opening the door to a flu pandemic...