New vaccines effective against H5N1, H7N9 avian influenza strains

Killing two bird flus with one stone. With a mysterious bird flu epidemic killing millions of chickens across the American Midwest, and a deadly human pandemic only a handful of viral mutations away, any new addition to our armory of bird-flu vaccines is great news. And now researchers in the US have described a method of developing vaccines against the H5N1 and H7N9 strains – both of which have killed hundreds of people since they first appeared, with H7N9 posing an exceptionally deadly threat to humans. The team may also be able to use this method to develop a vaccine against the deadly Midwest strain H5N2, if their current experiments are successful. To create the vaccines, the researchers worked with a drug that had been developed to fight another avian affliction: the Newcastle Disease. First, they cloned this vaccine, and then inserted bits of genetic material from the H5N1 and H7N9 into the...