[Vacets-local-dc] [Vietnam's vaccin for bird flu ...]

[Hai Tran]

http://www.time.com/time/asia/­magazine/article/0,13673,50105­0620-1071... 

The Vietnamese Strain: The WHO says Vietnam's bird flu vaccine program 
could hurt more than it helps   

BY KAY JOHNSON 

Monday, Jun. 13, 2005 

In the 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. 

But the World Health Organization (WHO) and other scientists are 
worried about Vietnam's vaccine, which they say could itself make 
people sick, or even set off a pandemic. The problem is that the virus 
reference seed—the weakened bit of 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, an epidemiologist and 
influenza expert at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 
but the Vietnamese method "may have provided a means for emergence of 
mutated H5N1 viruses in humans that may lead to a pandemic." 

WHO officials thought they had convinced Vietnam's government to call 
off human testing on its vaccine and develop a new one based on an 
approved virus seed provided by the WHO. But two top Vietnamese 
scientists tell TIME they will forge ahead with their own strain. 
"Nothing has changed," says Dr. Nguyen Thu Van, the head of the 
vaccine team. "We will test our vaccine on humans as planned before." 
There's little anyone can do: the WHO has no enforcement powers. "The 
danger is very unlikely," admits Michael Perdue, a WHO virus expert 
who has consulted with Vietnam. "But you just don't want to play with 
fire." 

>From the Jun. 20, 2005 issue of TIME Asia Magazine 

http://www.time.com/time/asia/­magazine/article/0,13673,50105­0620-1071... 




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