AvianBirdsFlu.com: key facts about Avian Influenza commonly called Bird Flu that created world health crises rivaled only by Plague and HIV.
Home Page News Virus Pandemic Vaccine Sympotms Links H5N1 Strain Forum	What do doctors suggest? Such medicines as Tamiflu and Relents help well against flu, including bird's flu. American company BioCryst Pharmaceuticals has recently started clinical tests of one more medicine - Peramivir. Vaccines against the bird's flu - both for birds, and for people - are developed and are being developed in many institutes and companies all over the world. Though many experts are rather skeptical about expediency of vaccination of a bird (in particular because vaccinated recovered birds can be virus carriers), some countries are preparing to it seriously, including China which has declared the plan of vaccination of all livestock of domestic birds - 3, 5 billion. The panic concerning the bird's flu has probably promoted that the EU has sponsored 1, 2 million euro on project Universal Vaccine - vaccine which is based on not traditional hemagglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N) but one more albumen of the capsule of flu virus, M2. First two albumens, firstly, differ in various strains of viruses (and different strains can be classified according to their types : H5N1 - is a present bird's flu, H1N1 - is so called "Spanish", etc., in total there are 128 possible combinations). Secondly, exactly these molecules vary especially strongly in mutations of a virus. Because of it the vaccine can appear to become inefficient even if the epidemic will be caused by a virus formally referring to the same strain against which we were vaccinated. Albumen ?2 has an identical structure into all strains of flu virus and is much less subjected to mutations, than hemagglutinin and neuraminidase. Developers - a group of researchers of molecular virology department of Gent University under the leadership of Xavier Selan - expect that in five years their vaccine will be ready for manufacturing as a nasal spray (no injections!). Pre-clinical tests of a vaccine against the bird's flu on the basis of the same albumen ?2, developed by Institute of allergology and immunology (La-Hoia, California) together with biopharmaceutical company Gemini Science come to the end. The group of the Japanese researchers from Hiroshima University under the leadership of Professor Tajdzo Uda has managed to pick out the unchangeable sequence of amino acids into a molecule of hemagglutinin and started to work on the universal anti-influenzal vaccine allowing immune system to distinguish this part of the albuminous capsule of the flu virus. New immunomodulating factors are being developed - for example, on a basis of the synthesis inhibitors of albumen SOCS1. This protein suppresses synthesis by an organism of interferon which is developed in large amount in reply to penetration of a virus infection into an organism. If the block is taken off and an organism is allowed to synthesize more interferon during 2-3 days, it will be able to struggle much better not only with the bird's flu, but also with any virus infection, up to AIDS inclusive. And so on. To the next pandemic of flu the mankind is already well prepared. And in 5-10 years all listed above and many other things will appear in vaccine studies and in drugstores. Probably, as a result the flu will completely disappear out of a human population … and its ecological niche will be occupied with other virus.