Word: influenza
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...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...
...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 to ensure that the virus hasn't mutated in the making of the vaccine, but they haven't opened all their records or allowed an inspection of their labs. The chances of mutations are slim, says Robin Robinson...
...addition, this year was “a mild season” according to Allen. “Most of the lack of influenza can be attributed to that fact,” he said...
...said that threat of Avian flu, which has jumped from birds to humans in 10 Asian countries, could prove to be far more deadly than the influenza epidemic that killed half a million...
That strand of influenza, which killed between 2.5 percent and 5 percent of those infected, “seems merciful in comparison to the 55-percent mortality rate of the current Avian flu,” Frist said...