Swine Flu

Swine Flu Vaccine on Horizon

A U.S researcher hopes to have a swine flu vaccine ready for testing in mice in two to three weeks.
And the vaccine could be ready for production in a few months, said Purdue University professor Suresh Mittal.

"We would like to have a vaccine in two to three weeks to start testing in mice," said Mittal, a comparative pathobiology professor in the School of Veterinary Medicine.

Mittal and collaborators at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will use a method he developed for dealing with the H5N1 bird flu to accelerate work on the H1N1 swine flu.
They will use a common cold virus to carry a gene of the H1N1 flu virus and stimulate cells to create both antibodies and cell-based protection that will guard against mutated forms of the flu virus.

"The adenovirus is incapable of replicating and does not seem to cause disease in humans," Mittal said in a news release. "That makes it a suitable virus to work with for flu vaccines."
The vaccine Mittal created for the bird flu worked on three different strains isolated over a seven-year period and was described in papers for the Journal of Infectious Diseases and the journal Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics.

A number of different institutions, both private and public, are working on a swine flu vaccine.
The latest WHO figures show 2,371 cases of influenza A(H1N1) infections have been reported in 24 countries, not including Brazil and Argentina, which reported their first cases later Thursday. Forty-six people have died, including 44 in Mexico and two in the United States.
"If things go well, and we achieve full-scale production, it will be several months until the vaccine will be available," a spokesman for the CDC cautioned.