Avian Flu

A federal advisory committee on Tuesday recommended approval of the first bird flu vaccine for humans, despite concerns about its safety and evidence that the shots won't protect most people. The panel said although the vaccine had significant shortcomings, it was safe and effective for use during a pandemic or in high-risk situations, such as military deployment to regions facing an outbreak. The vaccine, produced by the French drug company Sanofi-Aventis, won't be sold commercially.

Think bird flu will become a worldwide threat this summer? Wanna put some money on that? In an unusual effort to better predict the advance of a potential flu pandemic, public health experts will be staked about $100 apiece to bet on the spread of bird flu. This type of grim futures market has also been created to predict hurricanes and temporarily, a few years ago, terrorist attacks.

The Food and Drug Administration approved the United States' first human vaccine for bird flu Tuesday, saying it could slow a possible pandemic despite its modest effectiveness. "This is a sort of interim measure," said Norman W. Baylor, director of the FDA's Office of Vaccines Research and Review in Rockville, Md. In clinical trials, the vaccine for the H5N1 strain of bird flu provoked an immune response in 45% of people.

Blood taken from four Vietnamese survivors of the H5N1 bird flu virus protected mice from several strains of the virus, researchers reported Monday in the journal PLoS Medicine online. The researchers extracted antibody-producing white blood cells, called memory B cells, from the survivors' blood, then used a new treatment to make them produce antibodies continuously. Most of the mice who got the new antibodies survived, while all untreated mice died.

The H5N1 bird flu virus has mutated to infect people more easily, although it still has not transformed into a pandemic strain, researchers said Thursday. The changes are worrying, said Dr. Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. "We have identified a specific change that could make bird flu grow in the upper respiratory tract of humans," said Kawaoka, who led the study. "The viruses that are circulating in Africa and Europe are the ones closest to becoming a human virus."

Benin has reported its first outbreaks of bird flu in fowl and said the virus might have been introduced into the West African nation by illegal poultry imports from Ghana. Test results to determine the strain of the highly pathogenic avian influenza virus are pending, according to a report to the World Organization for Animal Health in Paris.

The father of a Chinese man who died from the H5N1 strain of bird flu this month was recovering after he was infected with the same virus, the official New China News Agency said. The 52-year-old man surnamed Lu from Nanjing, capital of the eastern coastal province Jiangsu, was feverish with the H5N1 strain but "showed signs of improvement," the agency said, quoting unidentified bird flu prevention experts. This latest case raises troublesome questions about how the man was infected.

International health experts are investigating Pakistan's first outbreak of bird flu in people to determine whether the virus was transmitted through human-to-human contact, officials said. Four brothers -- two of whom died -- and two cousins from Abbottabad, a small city about 30 miles north of Islamabad, were suspected of being infected with the H5N1 virus, World Health Organization spokesman Gregory Hartl said. Four WHO experts have been sent to Pakistan to investigate, Hartl said.

The World Health Organization confirmed a single case of human-to-human transmission of the H5N1 bird flu virus in a family in Pakistan, but said there was no apparent risk of it spreading wider. It said a team invited to Pakistan to look into an outbreak involving up to nine people from late October to Dec. 6 had found no evidence of sustained or community human-to-human transmission. All but the one brother who died have recovered. It was the first human-to-human H5N1 transmission in Pakistan.

Ordinary seasonal flu vaccines may provide a small amount of protection against bird flu, Italian researchers reported this week in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases. Their study is among the first to support the idea that getting an annual flu shot may help people's bodies fight off the H5N1 virus, which has killed 210 people in 13 countries and infected 341. Researchers in Rome tested the blood of 42 volunteers who had been vaccinated against seasonal influenza.