By Kevin Lavery, KWMU
St. Louis, MO. – The head of St. Louis University's Center for Vaccine Development says knowledge of past avian flu outbreaks could help scientists track viruses before they infect humans.
Writing in this week's New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Robert Belshe says the 1918 flu that killed millions worldwide crossed over from birds to humans.
Belshe says if a live virus nasal spray vaccine could be made to fight bird flu it might be efficiently mass produced:
You can get 100 does or even 1,000 doses of the nasal spray vaccine from one egg, Belshe said. And so, there are processes that we're working on that I think would improve the ability to make a vaccine for a large number of people.
Scientists successfully sequenced the genome of the 1918 flu earlier this year.
Meanwhile, clinical trials of an experimental avian flu vaccine are ongoing at three U.S. sites.